I spent a quiet Sabbath in Melton Mowbray; attended divine service in the old parish church and listened to two extemporaneous sermons full of simple and earnest teaching, and delivered in a conversational tone of voice.  Here, too, the parish church was seated in the midst of the great congregation which had long ceased to listen to the call of its Sabbath bells.  It was a beautiful and touching arrangement of the olden time to erect the House of Prayer in the centre of “God’s Acre,” that the shadow of its belfry and the Sabbath voice of its silvery bells might float for centuries over the family circles lying side by side in their long homes around the sanctuary.  There was a good and tender thought in making up this sabbath society of the living and the dead; in planting the narrow pathway between the two Sions with the white milestones of generations that had travelled it in ages gone, leaving here and there words of faith, hope and admonition to those following in their footsteps.  It is one of the contingencies of “higher civilization” that this social economy of the churchyard, that linked present and past generations in such touching and instructive companionship, has been suspended and annulled.

Melton Mowbray has also a very respectable individuality.  It is a great centre for the scarlet-coated Nimrods who scale hedges and ditches, in well-mounted squadrons, after a fox preserved at great expense and care to become the victim of their valor.  But this is a small and frivolous distinction compared with its celebrated manufacture of pork-pies.  It bids fair to become as famous for them as Banbury is for buns.  I visited the principal establishment for providing the travelling and picnicking world with these very substantial and palatable portables.  I went under the impulse of that uneasy, suspicious curiosity to peer into the forbidden mysteries of the kitchen which generally brings no satisfaction when gratified, and which often admonishes a man not only to eat what is set before him without any questions for conscience sake, but also for the sake of the more delicate and exacting sensibilities of the stomach.  I must confess my first visit to this, the greatest pork-pie factory in the world, savored a little of the anxiety to know the worst, instead of the best, in regard to the solid materials and lighter ingredients which entered into the composition of these suspiciously cheap luxuries.  There were points also connected with the process of their elaboration which had given me an undefinable uneasiness in the refreshment rooms of a hundred railway stations.  I was determined to settle these moot points once for all.  So I entered the establishment with an eye of as keen a speculation as an exciseman’s searching a building for illicit distillery, and I came out of it a more charitable and contented man.  All was above board, fair and clean.  The meat was fresh and good.  The flour was fine and sweet; the