noticed before; some containing 100 acres. The coming harvest is
putting forth the full glory of its golden promise. The weather is
all a farmer could wish, beautiful, warm, and bright. Nature, in
every feature of its various scapes, seems to smile with the joy of
that human happiness which her ministries inspire. Here, in these
still expanses, waving with luxuriant crops, apparently so thinly
peopled, one, forgetting the immense populations crowded into city
spaces, is almost tempted to ask, where are all the mouths to eat
this wide sea of food for man and beast, softening so gently into a
yellow sheen under the very rim of the distant horizon? But, in the
great heart of London, beating with the wants of millions, he will
be likely to reverse the question, and ask, where can one buy bread
wherewith to feed this great multitude?

At Sawston, a rustic little village on the southern border of
Cambridgeshire, I entered upon the enjoyment of English country-inn
life with that relish which no one born in a foreign land can so
fully feel as an American. As one looks upon the living face of
some distinguished celebrity for the first time, after having had
his portrait hung up in the parlor for twenty years, so an American
looks, for the first time, at that great and picturesque speciality
among human institutions, the village inn of old England. The like
of it he never saw in his own country and never will. In fact, he
would not like to see it there, plucked up out of its ancient
histories and associations. In the ever-green foliage of these it
stands inwoven, as with its own network of ivy. Other countries,
even older than England, have had their taverns from time
immemorial; but they are all kept in the background of human life.
They do not come out in contemporaneous history with any
definiteness; not even accidentally. If a king is murdered in one