NGTON MANOR.

AN OLD-FASHIONED LABOURING COUPLE.

COLN-ST.-ALDWYNS.

[Illustration: Stoke Poges Church. 019.png]

A COTSWOLD VILLAGE.

CHAPTER I.

FLYING WESTWARDS.

London is becoming miserably hot and dusty; everybody who can get away
is rushing off, north, south, east, and west, some to the seaside,
others to pleasant country houses. Who will fly with me westwards to the
land of golden sunshine and silvery trout streams, the land of breezy
uplands and valleys nestling under limestone hills, where the scream of
the railway whistle is seldom heard and the smoke of the factory
darkens not the long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman";
past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the
little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous
"Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that
yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How
those lines run in one's head this bright summer evening, as from our
railway carriage we note the great white dome of Stoke House peeping out
amid the elms! whilst every field reminds us of him who wrote those
lilting stanzas long, long ago.

"Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields, beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain:
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow;
As waving fresh their gladsome wing
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring."

But soon we are flashing past Reading, where Sutton's nursery gardens
are bright with scarlet and gold, and blue and white; every flower that
can be made to grow in our climate grows there, we may be sure. But
there is no need of garden flowers now, when the fields and hedges, even
the railway banks, are painted with the lovely blue of wild geraniums
and harebells, the gold of birdsfoot trefoil and Saint John's wort, and
the white and pink of convolvulus or bindweed. We are passing through
some of the richest scenery in the Thames valley. There, on the right,
is Mapledurham, a grand mediaeval building, surrounded by such a wealth
of stately trees as you will see nowhere else. The Thames runs
practically through the grounds. What a glorious carpet of gold is
spread over these meadows when the buttercups are in full bloom! Now
comes Pangbourne, with its lovely weir, where the big