ard II_.

It cannot be said that there are many pleasant walks and drives in the
Cotswold country, because, as a rule, the roads run over the bleak
tableland for miles and miles, and the landscape generally consists of
ploughed fields divided by grey stone walls; the downs I have referred
to at different times are only to be met with in certain districts. Once
upon a time the whole of Cotswold was one vast sheep walk from beginning
to end. It was about a hundred and fifty years ago that the idea of
enclosing the land was started by the first Lord Bathurst. Early in the
eighteenth century he converted a large tract of downland round
Cirencester into arable fields; his example was soon followed by others,
so that by the middle of last century the transformation of three
hundred square miles of downs into wheat-growing ploughed fields had
been accomplished. It is chiefly owing to the depression in agricultural
produce that there are any downs now, for they merely exist because the
tenants have found during the last twenty years that it does not pay to
cultivate their farms, hence they let a large proportion go back
to grass.

But there is one very pleasant walk in that part of the Cotswolds we
know best, and this takes you up the valley of the Coln to the Roman
villa at Chedworth.

The distance by road from Fairford to the Chedworth woods is about
twelve miles; and at any time of the year, but more especially in the
spring and autumn, it is a truly delightful pilgrimage.

And here it is worth our while to consider for a moment how tremendously
the abolition of the stage coach has affected places like Fairford,
Burford, and other Cotswold towns and villages. It was through these
old-world places, past these very walls and gables, that the mail
coaches rattled day after day when they "went down with victory"
conveying the news of Waterloo and Trafalgar into the heart of merry
England. In his immortal essay on "The English Mail Coach," De Quincey
has told us how between the years 1805 and 1815 it was worth paying
down five years of life for an outside place on a coach "going down with
victory." "On any night the spectacle was beautiful. The absolute
perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness,
their strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful
simplicity--but more than all, the royal magnificence of the
horses--were what might first have fixed the attention. But the night
before us is