e remoteness that seems to
exist between the precincts of this old-world community and the thronged
modern street out of which you have so recently emerged. Venturing
onward, however, you soon find yourself in the heart of Whitnash, and
see an irregular ring of ancient rustic dwellings surrounding the
village-green, on one side of which stands the church, with its square
Norman tower and battlements, while close adjoining is the vicarage,
made picturesque by peaks and gables. At first glimpse, none of the
houses appear to be less than two or three centuries old, and they are
of the ancient, wooden-framed fashion, with thatched roofs, which give
them the air of birds' nests, thereby assimilating them closely to the
simplicity of Nature.

The church-tower is mossy and much gnawed by time; it has narrow
loop-holes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over
the low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and
irregular, through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight.
Some of those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the
projections of the architecture. The church-yard is very small, and is
encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church
itself. In front of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of
incalculable age, with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty
head of foliage; though its boughs still keep some of the vitality which
perhaps was in its early prime when the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash.
A thousand years is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a yew.
We were pleasantly startled, however, by discovering an exuberance of
more youthful life than we had thought possible in so old a tree; for
the faces of two children laughed at us out of an opening in the trunk,
which had become hollow with long decay. On one side of the yew stood a
framework of worm-eaten timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me
exceedingly, till I made it out to be the village-stocks: a public
institution that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of
shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent church-yard. It is not to be
supposed, however, that this old-fashioned mode of punishment is still
in vogue among the good people of Whitnash. The vicar of the parish has
antiquarian propensities, and had probably dragged the stocks out of
some dusty hiding-place, and set them up on their former site as a
curiosity.

I disquiet mysel