reds and yellows of the turning beeches. What pleasaunces to dream in when you are amongst them! What faerielands to dream of when you are far away!

Listen to the names. Say them over softly—Maisemore, Hartpury, Lassington: these are in the vale. Don't you hear how homesick we are who whisper them lovingly where there are none to recognise them? And the King of the Cotswolds is Cissister (the railway may call it Cirencester if it likes, but that is how the natives know it)—Cissister of the wide market-place and narrow irregular streets, with the wise-looking old gabled houses that have smiled down upon so many generations of sturdy Cotswold folk. Grey are the Cotswold houses, stone-roofed and steeply gabled, welcoming, friendly, venerable; and surely there is something very delightful in the thought that just now young America looks down (from a considerable height too) on those same stone roofs and gables. For young America is flying (literally, not figuratively) all over the Cotswolds. One wonders what the Church and the Abbey and the House think when the light-hearted airmen almost shave their roofs.

The mention of young America brings me to what so entirely occupies all our thoughts just now, that there might seem something almost impertinently irrelevant in daring to write of anything else. But just inasmuch, as the old, easy-going, comfortable England has been in the melting-pot for nearly four years, and because the new, nobler, more strenuous England will change most things, it has seemed to me that it might not be amiss to collect these little sketches of some dear Cotswold folk, old and young, of what will soon seem an almost forgotten time.

Much has been written, and admirably written, of the Cotswolds themselves; but not much to my knowledge—except in the ever-delightful "Cotswold Village," by Arthur Gibbs—about the people.

Most of the people in this book belong to those old easy times of over twenty years ago. Only one of the stories deals with anything approaching "present day," and it is nearly four years old. One story—I may as well confess it here—has nothing to do with the Cotswolds; but Teddy in "A Soldier's Button" was Paul's cousin—and a dear, and the Cotswold country is the most hospitable country in the world, so we let him in. Mrs. Birkin, Mrs. Cushion, Williams, and Dorcas Heaven are of the soil, and so are the children.

Mrs. Birkin, Mrs. Cushion, and hundreds like them, have had their hand in the making of our men. They are but humble, simple folk. In their lives they asked but little of fate, and what fate sent they accepted with the patient philosophy of the poor. They belonged to their period, and their period has passed.

Cotswold names are so much prettier than any one can imagine that it has always been a self-denying ordinance to refrain from using them, but generally I have resisted temptation. Otherwise somebody might go seeking Mrs. Birkin in Arlington Row and be angry with me because she is no longer there. I live in terror of accurate people with large-scale maps, who seek to pin me down to this place or that. But they may take it from me that all the places are, as the Cotswold folk would say, "thar or thar about."

London, May 1918.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. Mrs. Birkin's Bonnet

2. A Philosopher of the Cotswolds

3. Especially Those

4. At Blue House Lock

5. Keturah

6. Mrs. Cushion's Children

7. Sanctuary

8. A Cotswold Barmaid

9. Fuzzy Wuzzy's Watch

10. The Dark Lady

11. Her First Appearance

12. "Our Fathers Have Told Us"

13. A Giotto of the Cotswolds

14. The Day After

15. A Coup d'État

16. The Staceys of Elcombe House

17. A Soldier's Button

18. Paul and the Playwright

19. A Misfit

20. The Contagion of Honour

CHILDREN OF THE DEAR COTSWOLDS

I

MRS. BIRKIN'S BONNET