Dickens on Cricket--Dumkins and Podder, Limited--How Dumkins Hit a "Sixer"--Downfall of "Podder"--Bourton-on-the-Water C.C.--A Plague of Wasps--The Treatment of Cricket Grounds--The Author's Recipe--Reflections on Modern Cricket.

CHAPTER XII.

THE COTSWOLDS THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

The Centre of Elizabethan Sport--A Digression on South Africa--The Halo of Association--A Day's Stag-Hunting in 1592--A Benighted Sportsman--"A Goodly Dwelling and a Rich"--An Old English Gentleman--Shakespeare on Hounds--He Describes the Run--The Death of the Stag--The Ancestral Peregrine--Bacon not Wanted--A "Black Ousel"--The Charm of Music--Shakespeare's Dream--A Hawking Expedition--Peregrine, the Parson, and the Poet--Methods and Language of Falconry--A Flight at a Heron--Peregrine Views a Fox.

CHAPTER XIII.

CIRENCESTER

Roman Remains--The Corinium Museum--The Church--Cirencester House--The Park--The Abbey--The "Mop" or Hiring Fair--A Great Hunting Centre--A Varied Country--The Badminton Hounds--Lord Bathurst's Hounds--The Cotswold Hounds--Charles Travess--A Born Genius--The Cricklade Hounds--The Right Sort of Horse--The Oaksey District--The Heythrop Hounds--A Defence of Hard Riding--A Day in the Vale--A Hunting Poem.

CHAPTER XIV.

SPRING IN THE COTSWOLDS

Habits of Moorhens--Mallard and Swan--Nuthatches--Woodpeckers--Humane Traps--Badgers--Fox-terriers--Scotch Deerhounds--Retrievers--Cray-fish--The Rookery--Jackdaws--Foxes--Artificial Earths--Fox among Sheep--Foxes and Fowls--Poultry Claims--Observations on Scent--The Hygrometer--How Trout are Netted--Scarcity of Otters--Water-Voles.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PROMISE OF MAY

Wild Flowers--Cottage Gardens--The Paths of Literature--Description of a Horse--Beauty of Trees--Their Loss Irreparable as the Loss of Friends--A Fine Type of Englishman--Lines in Memory of W.D. Llewelyn.

CHAPTER XVI.

SUMMER DAYS ON THE COTSWOLDS

A Walk in the Fields--Hedgerow Flowers--The Brookside--By "the Pill"--Remarks on Gray--A Fine Piece of Miniature Scenery--The Cricket Ground--The Book of Nature--At the Ford--Habits of Observation--In the Conyger Wood--The Home of the Kingfisher--A Limestone Quarry--The Great Stone Floor of the Earth--Nature's Endless Cycle--Beauty of the Ash--Hedgehogs--Trout and Snake--Sunset on the Hills.

CHAPTER XVII.

AUTUMN

Remarks on Country Life--Thrashing--The Flail--Gipsies--Harvest Feasts--Fifty Years Ago--The Wolds in Autumn--By the Stream--Wildfowl--Migration of Birds--Lapwings--Winter Visitants--Thunderstorms--Glow-Worms--A Brilliant Meteor--Night on the Hills--The "Blowing-Stone"--Christmas Day on the Cotswolds--A Solar Halo--Hamlet Festivities--Tom Peregrine Baffled--The Mummers Play--The Victorian Era--The True Days of "Merrie England"--Carpe Diem.

CHAPTER XVIII.

WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN

APPENDIX.

GEORGE RIDLER'S OVEN

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

• PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MESSRS. SHAWCROSS.
• STOKE POGES CHURCH.
• THE OLD MANOR HOUSE.
• INSCRIPTION ON PORCH OF MANOR HOUSE.
• INTERIOR OF MANOR HOUSE.
• IN THE GARDEN.
• A COTSWOLD MANOR HOUSE.
• COTSWOLD COTTAGES.
• A FARMHOUSE BY THE COLN.
• AN OLD COTTAGE.
• THE HAMLET.
• ON THE WOLDS.
• OXEN PLOUGHING.
• THE OLD CUSTOMER.
• THE OLD MILL, ABLINGTON.
• THE COLN NEAR BIBURY.
• A BRIDGE OVER THE COLN.
• A DISH OF FISH.
• BURFORD PRIORY.
• BURFORD PRIORY.
• THE MANOR HOUSE, COLN-ST.-ALDWYNS.
• BIBURY STREET.
• ARLINGTON ROW.
• VILLAGE CRICKETERS.
• HAWKING.
• BIBURY COURT.
• THE ABBEY GATEWAY, CIRENCESTER.
• MARKET-PLACE, CIRENCESTER.
• AN OLD BARN.
• THE "PILL" BRIDGE.
• IN BIBURY VILLAGE.
• SIDE VIEW OF MANOR HOUSE.
• BIBURY MILL.
• BELOW THE "PILL".
• ABLINGTON MANOR.
• AN OLD-FASHIONED LABOURING COUPLE.
• COLN-ST.-ALDWYNS.

A COTSWOLD VILLAGE.

CHAPTER I.

FLYING WESTWARDS.

London is becoming miserably hot and dusty; everybody who can get away is rushing off, north, south, east, and west, some to the seaside, others to pleasant country houses. Who will fly with me westwards to the land of golden sunshine and silvery trout streams, the land of breezy uplands and valleys nestling under limestone hills, where the scream of the railway whistle is seldom heard and the smoke of the factory darkens not the long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman"; past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous "Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How those lines run in one's head