The school-house is still standing in Huntingdon, in good condition and busy occupation, in which Oliver Cromwell stormed the English alphabet and carried the first parallel of monosyllables at the point of the pen.  The very form or bench of oak from which he mounted the breach is still occupied by boys of the same size and age, with the same number of inches between their feet and the floor which separated it from his.  Had the photographic art been discovered in his day, we might have had his face and form as he looked when seated as a rosy-faced, light-haired boy in the rank and file of the youngsters gathered within those walls.  What an overwhelming revelation it would have been to his young, honest and merry mind, if some seer, like him who told Hazael his future, could have given him a sudden glimpse of what he was to be and do in his middle manhood!

After tea, I continued my walk westward to a small, quiet, comfortable village, about five miles from Huntingdon, where I became the guest of “The Old Mermaid,” who extended her amphibious hospitalities to all strangers wishing bed and board for the night.  Both I received readily and greatly enjoyed under her roof, especially the former.  Never did I occupy a bed so fringed with the fanciful artistries of dreamland.  It was close up under the thatched roof, and it was the most easy and natural thing in the world for the fancies of the midnight hour to turn that thatching into hair, and to cheat my willing mind with the delusion that I was sleeping with the long, soft tresses of Her Submarine Ladyship wound around my head.  It was a delightful vagary of the imagination, which the morning light, looking in through the little checker-work window, gently dispelled.

The next day I bent my course in a north-westerly direction, and passed through a very fertile and beautiful section.  The scenery was truly delightful;—­not grand nor splendid, but replete with quiet pictures that please the eye and touch the heart with a sense of gladness.  The soft mosaic work of the gently rounded hills, or figures wrought in wheat, barley, oats, beans, turnips, and meadow and pasture land, and grouped into landscapes in endless alternation of lights and shades, and all this happy little world now veiled by the low, summer clouds, now flooded by a sunburst between them—­all these lovely and changing sceneries made my walk like one through a continuous gallery of paintings.

Harvesting had commenced in real earnest, and the wheat-fields were full of reapers, some wielding the sickle, others the scythe.  When I saw men and women bending almost double to cut their sheaves close to the ground, I longed to walk through a barley-field with one of our American cradles, and show them how we do that sort of thing.  As yet I have seen no reaping machines in operation, and I doubt if they will ever come into such extensive use here as with us, owing to the abundance of cheap labor in this country.  I saw on this day’s walk the heaviest crop of wheat that I have noticed since I left London.  It must have averaged sixty bushels to the acre for the whole field.