That cutting down of our pedal pride resulted in our subscribing to a daily paper.  Every morning before stretching out to our regular day’s tramp we had been wont to trot through dewy lanes, over stiles, and across subtly-colored turnip- and cabbage-fields, to purchase in the town of M——­ a luxury not to be had in our own hamlet,—­the “Daily News.”  Rain or shine, that trot must be trotted, for there were those among us who would have tramped sulkily all day and sniffed the sniff of wrath at ivied church and thatched cottage were the acid of their natures not made frothy and light by the alkali of their morning paper.  It had never occurred to us, not even when we camped beneath wayside shade around our sandwiches and ale or in some stiff and dim inn-parlor and listened to the reading of the “News,” that in reality the town of M——­, and not the brickhood of Ethel, was thus the centre of all our ambulatory circumferences.  It had never before dawned upon us that we thus added three uncounted miles to our fourteen diurnally counted ones.  What astonishment at our own pedometric weakness of calculation!  What disgust to find our periphery thus three whole miles smaller than it need have been!

The next day we subscribed to the “News,” and walked nine miles as the bee flies from the front door of Ethel even unto the ruins of Medmenham.  And we vowed by all our plaster gods and painted goddesses that another summer we would tramp no more.  We would ’cycle.

A mile away from Ethel is the village proper of Cookham.  It is a sleepy town, save in the boating-season; and whoever enters the post-office in any season finds it empty and inhospitable.  Raps upon a tightly-closed inner door call a woman attendant from rattling sewing or noisy gossip of the invisible penetralia; and as soon as the business is done the inhospitable door swings shut again in the stranger’s face.

Cookham houses are quaint, often timbered, frequently ivy-grown from basement to roof.  One imagines them assuming a half-sullen air at this yearly breaking of their dreamy repose by incursions of parti-colored hordes for whom life seems to hold but two supreme objects,—­boats and pictures.

The most picturesque feature of the place is the old church, set amid tombs whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs have exchanged grins for two hundred years and more.  The old flint tower is grave and grim, but softened by a wonderful centuries old ivy in a veil of living green.  A pathetic interest to artists hallows the venerable church-yard.  Here sleeps Frederick Walker, a genius cut off before his meridian, and resting now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, over which the Thames waters surge every spring, leaving the grave all the rest of the year the sadder for its cold soddenness and for the humid mildew and decay eating already into the headstone, as yet but twelve years old.  In the church itself is Thorneycroft’s mural tablet to the dead artist, a portrait head of him who was born almost within the old church’s shadow, and whose pencil dealt always so lovingly with the poetic aspects of his native region.