Sweet, secluded, shady Saxonholme! I doubt if our whole England contains
another hamlet so quaint, so picturesquely irregular, so thoroughly
national in all its rustic characteristics. It lies in a warm hollow
environed by hills. Woods, parks and young plantations clothe every
height and slope for miles around, whilst here and there, peeping down
through green vistas, or towering above undulating seas of summer
foliage, stands many a fine old country mansion, turreted and gabled,
and built of that warm red brick that seems to hold the light of the
sunset long after it has faded from the rest of the landscape. A silver
thread of streamlet, swift but shallow, runs noisily through the meadows
beside the town and loses itself in the Chad, about a mile and a half
farther eastward. Many a picturesque old wooden bridge, many a foaming
weir and ruinous water-mill with weedy wheel, may be found scattered up
and down the wooded banks of this little river Chad; while to the brook,
which we call the Gipstream, attaches a vague tradition of trout.

The hamlet itself is clean and old-fashioned, consisting of one long,
straggling street, and a few tributary lanes and passages. The houses
some few years back were mostly long and low-fronted, with projecting
upper stories, and diamond-paned bay-windows bowered in with myrtle and
clematis; but modern improvements have done much of late to sweep away
these antique tenements, and a fine new suburb of Italian and Gothic
villas has sprung up, between the town and the railway station. Besides
this, we have a new church in the mediæval style, rich in gilding and
colors and thirteenth-century brass-work; and a new cemetery, laid out
like a pleasure-garden; and a new school-house, where the children are
taught upon a system with a foreign name; and a Mechanics' Institute,
where London professors come down at long intervals to expound popular
science, and where agriculturists meet to discuss popular grievances.