the great farm-wagon tribune, to the multitudinous and motley congregation assembled under his park trees.  This year it was unusually rich and piquant, from the expanded area of events and aspects.  In presenting these, as bearing upon the causes of Temperance, Peace, Anti-War, Anti-Slavery, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Capital Punishment, Anti-Church-Rates, Free Trade, Woman’s Rights, Parliamentary Reform, Social Reform, Scientific Progress, Discovery of the Sources of the Nile, and other important movements, he was necessarily obliged to be somewhat discursive.  But he generalised with much ease and perspicuity, and conducted the thread of his discourse, like a rivulet of light, through the histories of the year; transporting the mind of his audience from doings in Japan to those in America, from Poland to Mexico, and through stirring regions of Geography, Politics, Philanthropy, Social Science and Economy, by gentle and interesting transitions.  This annual statement is very valuable and instructive, and should have a wider publicity than it usually obtains.

When “the fine old English gentleman all of the olden time” has concluded his resume of the year’s progress, and the prospects it leaves to the one incoming, the orators of the different causes which he has thus reported, arise one after the other, and the bright air and the green foliage of the over-spreading trees, as well as the listening multitude below are stirred with fervid speeches, sometimes interspersed with “music from the band.”  The Festival is wound up by a banquet in the hall, given by the munificent host to a large number of guests, representing the various good movements advocated from the platform described.  Many Americans have spoken from that rostrum, and sat at that banquet table in years gone by, and they will attest to the correctness of these slight delineations of the character of the host and of the annual festival that will perpetuate his name in long and pleasant remembrance.

Oakham is a goodly and pleasant town, the chief and capital of Rutlandshire.  It has the ruins of an old castle in its midst, and several interesting antiquities and customs.  It, too, has its unique speciality or prerogative.  I was told that every person of title driving through the town, or coming to reside within the jurisdiction of its bye-laws, must leave his card to the authorities in the shape of a veritable horse-shoe.  It is said that the walls of the old town hall are hung with these iron souvenirs of distinguished visits; thus constituting a museum that would be instructive to a farrier or blacksmith, as well as to the antiquarian.

From Oakham I walked to Melton Mowbray, a cleanly, good-looking town in Leicestershire, situated on the little river Eye.  One cannot say exactly in regard to Rutlandshire what an Englishman once said to the authorities of a pigmy Italian duchy, who ordered him to leave it in twenty-four hours.  “I only require fifteen minutes,” said cousin John, with a look and tone which Jonathan could not imitate.  This rural county is to the shire-family of England what Rhode Island is to the American family of States—­the smallest, but not least, in several happy characteristics.