begin my story, or will you have more of it? Remember, I've only been
over a little bit of the hillside yet--what you could ride round easily
on your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the Vale, by
Blowing Stone Hill; and if I once begin about the Vale, what's to stop
me? You'll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and
Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles the First (the Vale was
near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant--full of Throgmortons, Puseys,
and Pyes, and such like; and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read
Thomas Ingoldsby's "Legend of Hamilton Tighe"? If you haven't, you ought
to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived, before he went to sea;
his real name was Hamden Pye, and the Pyes were the great folk at
Farringdon. Then there's Pusey. You've heard of the Pusey horn, which
King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old
squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders turned out
of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to
his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire
nights. And the splendid old cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas
town. How the whole countryside teems with Saxon names and memories!
And the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside,
where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright water-lilies
in the moat, and its yew walk, "the cloister walk," and its peerless
terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things beside, for
those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of
things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English
country neighbourhood.

Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well,
well, I've done what I can to make you; and if you will go gadding over
half Europe now, every holidays, I can't help it. I was born and bred
a west-country man, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest