American cousins, who make their pilgrimage to the Hardy country in ever-increasing numbers, may be glad to be reminded that it was in the environs of this Dorset Dorchester that John Lothrop Motley, the celebrated historian, made his English home, he having been born, curiously enough, in the younger Dorchester of Massachusetts. He died, in 1877, at Kingston Russell, the home of his daughter, Lady Vernon Harcourt, and was buried near his wife in Kensal Green Cemetery.

No visitor should leave the town without paying a brief visit to the great earthworks of Maumbury Rings and Poundbury Camp, the former of which is undergoing a series of scientific excavations by Mr. St. George Gray, engaged for the purpose by a joint committee of the Dorset Field Club and the British Archæological Association. Thomas Hardy, whose Dorchester home is but a short distance away, describes Maumbury as "a huge circular enclosure, with a notch at opposite extremities of its diameter, north and south. It was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude." It has been estimated that the enclosure could accommodate 13,000 spectators, and over 10,000 are said to have assembled here in 1705, when Mary Channing was strangled and burned, on very slight evidence, for the murder of her husband. Both of these historic earthworks were nearly destroyed in the early days of railway enterprise, and Poundbury was saved only at the last moment by Brunel consenting to tunnel beneath instead of taking his line right through it, as he had at first intended. In the Wessex novels and poems it figures as "Square Pummerie", the place where Henchard's "merry-making" occurred.

BERE REGIS

One of the most delightful of the numerous walks from Dorchester is that which leaves the town by the two bridges near the White Hart, the spot where the local High Street merges imperceptibly into the great London Road. Journeying along this great chalk highway a fine view is obtained of the suburb of Fordington, the "Durnover" of The Mayor of Casterbridge.

A mile or so of pleasant, if somewhat dusty, walking brings us to Stinsford crossroads, where a right-hand turn leads to Stinsford House, with its terraced garden, and a very pretty church, the Mellstock Church of Under the Greenwood Tree. In this pleasing little church Tranter Dewy and his family attended service, and here the valiant Thomas Leaf listened to the sermons of "His Holiness". It was at Mellstock that Elizabeth-Jane and her mother caught their first glimpse of the town of Casterbridge.

From Stinsford a charming walk through the park of Kingston House, the Knapwater House of Desperate Remedies, brings us to the junction of the roads that lead to Higher and Lower Bockhampton respectively.

We are now near a portion of the "Tess" locality, for a short distance to the right stands Norris Mill, the "Talbothays" of the novel, while the Frome Valley, in which it is situated, is the "Vale of Great Dairies", the "valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness". Here, too, is the western extremity of the far-famed "Egdon Heath", that succession of wild unenclosed moorlands that stretch in unbroken continuity from near Dorchester to Poole Harbour; but a description of this vast heathland must be deferred for the moment, for a short walk leads to Higher Bockhampton, a most charming and secluded hamlet, at the farther end of which is the birthplace of the Wessex novelist, a small thatched house embowered in a world of rural opulence. Mr. Hardy's childhood's days were impregnated with rustic peace and solitude, and the formative influences of his early environment have left their mark on his great romances. From the birthplace a most pleasant ramble over Bockhampton Heath leads into the Yellowham Woods, the "Great Yalbury" wood, in the depths of which Fancy Day resided when living in her father's cottage. Here, too, as told in Far from the Madding Crowd, Joseph Poorgrass had the experience, the re-telling of which always put this most modest of men to the blush.

Out on to the main road again, the same one that we left at Stinsford crossroads, a short walk past the little hamlet of Troy Town, and we enter Puddletown (strictly Piddleton, from the A.S. piddle, a small stream), the old home of the de Pydels, and the "Weatherbury" of romance. Occupying a prominent position facing the village square where used to stand the maypole, stocks, and Hundred house, is a thatched house with a projecting window supported on columns, which architects consider to be one of the finest Georgian windows in the country. This was, in the eighteenth century, the private residence of the Boswells.

"Weatherbury" is a most interesting place, although somewhat altered since Far from the Madding Crowd was penned. The old malthouse, wherein the villagers gave such a warm welcome to Gabriel Oak on his taking service with Bathsheba, has vanished completely, but the church, of which a proposed rebuilding of an Elizabethan chancel on the lines of a larger original chancel has caused a fierce and bitter controversy in the press, has met with little molestation. It contains the Athelhampton Chapel, with a panelled entrance arch, in which are some remarkable monuments and brasses, the former of which include a magnificent recumbent effigy in alabaster, with a "vizored salade", and a fluted shield, commemorating a member of the Martin family, who lived at the neighbouring Athelhampton Hall, a fine ancestral home, and the "Athel Hall" of the Wessex Poems. The Norman font in the church is worth inspection, as also are the fifteenth-century panelled roof of Spanish chestnut of the nave, and the Carolean gallery where Gabriel Oak sang in the choir.

Very simple were the old services in these village churches, with the farm hands attending service on Sunday afternoons as regularly as they went to work on Monday mornings. Now and then maybe a bucolic rustic would doze off to sleep, until his slumbers were disturbed by the beadle; and many of the old natives can remember when this ecclesiastical official would rap his long wand of office on the skull of a sleeping rustic, with a crack that echoed through the sacred edifice. In the north porch of the church Sergeant Troy passed the night after Fanny Robin's funeral.

A short distance away is Lower Waterson, "a hoary building of the Jacobean stage of classic renaissance", and the home of Bathsheba Everdene, where the great "Shearing Barn", so delightfully described by Mr. Hardy, may still be seen, although the novelist had in his mind's eye the far more spacious and magnificent tithe barn at