feet, but the average
altitude would not exceed half that height. Almost every valley has its
little brook. The district is essentially a "stone country;" for all the
houses and most of their roofs are built of the local limestone, which
lies everywhere on these hills within a few inches of the surface. There
is no difficulty in obtaining plenty of stone hereabouts. The chief
characteristics of the buildings are their antiquity and Gothic
quaintness. The air is sharp and bracing, and the climate, as is
inevitable on the shallow, porous soil of the oolite hills, wonderfully
dry and invigorating. "Lands of gold have been found, and lands of
spices and precious merchandise; but this is the land of _health_" Thus
wrote Richard Jefferies of the downs, and thus say we of the Cotswolds.

And now our Great Western express is gliding into Cirencester, the
ancient capital of the Cotswold country. How fair the old place seems
after the dirt and smoke of London! Here town and country are blended
into one, and everything is clean and fresh and picturesque. The garish
church, as you view it from the top of the market-place, has a charm
unsurpassed by any other sacred building in the land. In what that charm
lies I have often wondered. Is it the marvellous symmetry of the whole
graceful pile, as the eye, glancing down the massive square tower and
along the pierced battlements and elaborate pinnacles, finally rests on
the empty niches and traceried oriel windows of the magnificent south
porch? I cannot say in what the charm exactly consists, but this stately
Gothic fane has a grandeur as impressive as it is unexpected, recalling
those wondrous words of Ruskin's:

"I used to feel as much awe in gazing at the buildings as on the hills,
and could believe that God had done a greater work in breathing into the
narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom its haughty walls had been
raised and its burning legends written, than in lifting the rock of
granite higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with their
various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine."

[Illustration: The Old Manor House. 029.png]

CHAPTER II.

A COTSWOLD VILLAGE.

The village is not a hundred miles from London, yet "far from the
madding crowd's ignoble strife." A green, well-wooded valley, in the
midst of those far-stretching, cold-looking Cotswold Hills, it is like
an oasis in the desert.

Up above on the wolds all is bleak, dull, and uninterest