And now our Great Western express is gliding into Cirencester, the ancient capital of the Cotswold country.  How fair the old place seems after the dirt and smoke of London!  Here town and country are blended into one, and everything is clean and fresh and picturesque.  The garish church, as you view it from the top of the market-place, has a charm unsurpassed by any other sacred building in the land.  In what that charm lies I have often wondered.  Is it the marvellous symmetry of the whole graceful pile, as the eye, glancing down the massive square tower and along the pierced battlements and elaborate pinnacles, finally rests on the empty niches and traceried oriel windows of the magnificent south porch?  I cannot say in what the charm exactly consists, but this stately Gothic fane has a grandeur as impressive as it is unexpected, recalling those wondrous words of Ruskin’s: 

“I used to feel as much awe in gazing at the buildings as on the hills, and could believe that God had done a greater work in breathing into the narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom its haughty walls had been raised and its burning legends written, than in lifting the rock of granite higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine.”

[Illustration:  The Old Manor House. 029.png]

CHAPTER II.

A COTSWOLD VILLAGE.

The village is not a hundred miles from London, yet “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.”  A green, well-wooded valley, in the midst of those far-stretching, cold-looking Cotswold Hills, it is like an oasis in the desert.

Up above on the wolds all is bleak, dull, and uninteresting.  The air up there is ever chill; walls of loose stone divide field from field, and few houses are to be seen.  But down in the valley all is fertile and full of life.  It is here that the old-fashioned villagers dwell.  How well I remember the first time I came upon it!  One fine September evening, having left all traces of railways and the ancient Roman town of Cirencester some seven long miles behind me, with wearied limbs I sought this quiet, sequestered spot.  Suddenly, as I was wondering how amid these never ending hills there could be such a place as I had been told existed, I beheld it at my feet, surpassing beautiful!  Below me was a small village, nestling amid a wealth of stately trees.  The hand of man seemed in some bygone time to have done all that was necessary to render the place habitable, but no more.  There were cottages, bridges, and farm buildings, but all were ivy clad and time worn.  The very trees themselves appeared to be laden with a mantle of ivy that was more than they could bear.  Many a tall fir, from base to topmost twig, was completely robed with the smooth, five-pointed leaves of this rapacious evergreen.  Through the thick foliage, of elm and ash and beech, I could just see an old