he rest of the family
slept underneath the counter.

* * * * *

Ah well! _Tempora mutantur!_ "Nimrod" and his "notables" are all gone.

"The knights' bones are dust,
And their good swords rust,
Their souls are with the saints, I trust."

And whereas up to fifty years ago Burford was a rich country town,
famous for the manufacture of paper, malt, and sailcloth--enriched, too,
by the constant passage of numerous coaches stopping on their way from
Oxford to Gloucester--it is now little more than a village--the
quietest, the cleanest, and the quaintest place in Oxfordshire. Perhaps
its citizens are to be envied rather than pitied:

"bene est cui deus obtulit
Parca, quod satis est, manu."

Let us go up to the top of the main street, and sit down on the ancient
oak bench high up on the hill, whence we can look down on the old-world
place and get a birdseye view of the quaint houses and the surrounding
country. And now we may exclaim with Ossian, "A tale of the times of
old! The deeds of days of other years!" For yonder, a mile away from the
town, the kings of Mercia and Wessex fought a desperate battle in the
year A.D. 685. Quite recently a tomb was found there containing a stone
coffin weighing nearly a ton. The bones of the warrior who fought and
died there were marvellously complete when disturbed in their
resting-place--in fact, the skeleton was a perfect one.

"Whose fame is in that dark green tomb? Four stones with their heads of
moss stand there. They mark the narrow house of death. Some chief of
fame is here! Raise the songs of old! Awake their memory in the
tomb." [4]

[Footnote 4: Ossian.]

Tradition has it that this was the body of a great Saxon chief,
Aethelhum, the mighty standard-bearer of the Mercian King Ethelbald. It
was in honour of this great warrior that the people of Burford carried a
standard emblazoned with a golden dragon through the old streets on
midsummer eve, annually, for nigh on a thousand years. We are told that
it was only during last century that the custom died out.

How beautiful are some of the old houses in the broad and stately High
Street!

The ancient building in the centre of the town is called the "Tolsey";
it must be more than four hundred years old. The name originated in the
custom of paying tolls due to the lord of the manor in the building.
There are some grand old iron chests here; one of these old boxe