y heart of pastoral Wilts.
I went right through it only the other day, journeying from Sarum to
Trowbridge on county business--Wishford, Wylye, Codford, Heytesbury,
and so on to Melksham and Westbury--names which to us are symphonies.
No change from the sempiternal round of country labour in those quiet
hollows, though it is true that you saw soldiers in buff unloading
railway trucks, and that the valley was lined with their wooden
hutments. Soldiers, indeed, we have known ever since the Norman
Conquest; but the country is bigger than they are, and they fall
into its ways even as their huts fade into the shadows cast by its
everlasting hills. Mr. Hudson, by the way, does not seem to have
encountered a witch. We had one in this village a few years ago, and
she may be here still, though I haven't come across her. She laid a
malison on my chauffeur's potatoes--I had one once--and (as he told
me) blighted the year's crop. He was digging in his garden when she, a
dark-browed old woman with a beard, leaned over the gate and asked him
for some kindling wood. He, a Swiss, who may not have understood her,
waved her away, saying that he was busy. "You will get no good out of
those taters," said she, and slippered away. That was five years ago.

John Halsham is fond of describing himself as a Tory, and perhaps
really is one of those almost extinct mammalia. I had thought
Professor Saintsbury the only one left. He, I understand, thinks
that the Reform Act of 1832 was a great mistake, and dislikes Horace
Walpole's Letters because their writer was a Whig. Then there is Mrs.
Partington's nephew, who muses perhaps without method, but certainly
not without malice, in _Blackwood_ once a month. He is more Jingo than
Tory. He has to bite somebody. I was amused the other day to consider
his girding at Sir Alfred Mond, chiefly on the score that he had a
German grandfather. It did not seem to have occurred to the man that
the same terrific charge could be brought against a much more august
Personage, and with much the same futility. Surely it is more to the
purpose that he will have an English grandson, That is the worst of
musing when you neglect method and surrender to malice.

Toryism, which is a parasitic growth of mind, needs a relic to which
it can cling, not a person. In the country the Church will not provide
it, nor any longer the brewing interest. The air has been let into
the one, and the water which they call mineral into the oth