r the
swift succession of beautiful scenes, with the low sun flaming on the
"coloured shades," served to keep out of my mind something that should
have been in it. At all events, it was odd that I had more than once
promised myself a visit to the very village I was approaching solely
because William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now no
thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in my mind.

Arrived at the village I went straight to the "George and Dragon," where
a friend had assured me I could always find good accommodations. But
he was wrong: there was no room for me, I was told by a weird-looking,
lean, white-haired old woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She
appeared to resent it that any one should ask for accommodation at
such a time, when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms
available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her: couldn't she
direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed? No, she couldn't--it is
always so; but after the third time of asking she unfroze so far as to
say that perhaps they would take me in at a cottage close by. So I went,
and a poor kind widow who lived there with a son consented to put me
up. She made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself
before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on the dim
walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a cottage, but in
a large room with an oak floor and wainscoting. "Do you call this a
cottage?" I said to the woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have
it as a cottage, but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she
returned. Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This then
is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay seventy or eighty
years ago," I said. She had never heard of William Cobbett; she only
knew that at that date it had been tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a
Roman Catholic, who had some curious ideas about the land.

That settled it. Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and I had come
to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to stay. But how odd that
my first thought of the man should have come to me when sitting by the
fire where Cobbett himself had sat on many a cold evening! And this was
November the second, the very day eighty-odd years ago when he paid his
first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first date he gives
in Rural Rides. And he too had been delighted with the place and the