ry are near. The trout-fisher can approach very
close to it. The rail gives easy communication, but has not spoilt
the seclusion.

Monsieur Lesseps, of Suez Canal fame, is reported to have said that
Marlborough Forest was the finest he had seen in Europe. Certainly
no one who had not seen it would believe that a forest still existed
in the very heart of Southern England so completely recalling those
woods and 'chases' upon which the ancient feudal monarchs set such
store.

VILLAGE CHURCHES

The black rooks are busy in the old oak-trees, carrying away the
brown acorns one by one in their strong beaks to some open place
where, undisturbed, they can feast upon the fruit. The nuts have
fallen from the boughs, and the mice garner them out of the ditches;
but the blue-black sloes cling tight to the thorn-branch still. The
first frost has withered up the weak sap left in the leaves, and
they whirl away in yellow clouds before the gusts of wind. It is the
season, the hour of half-sorrowful, half-mystic thought, when the
past becomes a reality and the present a dream, and unbidden
memories of sunny days and sunny faces, seen when life was all
spring, float around:

Dim dream-like forms! your shadowy train
Around me gathers once again;
The same as in life's morning hour,
Before my troubled gaze you passed.
* * * * *
Forms known in happy days you bring,
And much-loved shades amid you spring,
Like a tradition, half expired,
Worn out with many a passing year.

In so busy a land as ours there is no place where the mind can, as
it were, turn in upon itself so fully as in the silence and solitude
of a village church.

There is no ponderous vastness, no oppressive weight of gloomy roof,
no weird cavernous crypts, as in the cathedral; only a _visible_
silence, which at once isolates the soul, separates it from external
present influences, and compels it, in falling back upon itself, to
recognize its own depth and powers. In daily life we sit as in a
vast library filled with tomes, hurriedly writing frivolous letters
upon 'vexatious nothings,' snatching our food and slumber, for ever
rushing forward with beating pulse, never able to turn our gaze away
from the goal to examine the great storehouse, the library around
us. Upon the infinitely delicate organization of the brain
innumerable pictures are hourly painted; these, too, we hurry by,
ignoring them, push