In another of our excursions we visited a venerable church, where our attention was called to a particular monument.  It was erected to the memory of one of the best of husbands by his “wretched widow,” who records upon the marble that there never was such a man on the face of the earth before, and never will be again, and that there never was anybody so miserable as she,—­no, never, never, never!  These are not the exact words, but this is pretty nearly what she declares.  The story is that she married again within a year.

From my window at the Foley Arms I can see the tower of the fine old abbey church of Malvern, which would be a centre of pilgrimages if it were in our country.  But England is full of such monumental structures, into the history of which the local antiquarians burrow, and pass their peaceful lives in studying and writing about them with the same innocent enthusiasm that White of Selborne manifested in studying nature as his village showed it to him.

In our long drives we have seen everywhere the same picturesque old cottages, with the pretty gardens, and abundant flowers, and noble trees, more frequently elms than any other.  One day—­it was on the 10th of July—­we found ourselves driving through what seemed to be a gentleman’s estate, an ample domain, well wooded and well kept.  On inquiring to whom this place belonged, I was told that the owner was Sir Edmund Lechmere.  The name had a very familiar sound to my ears.  Without rising from the table at which I am now writing, I have only to turn my head, and in full view, at the distance of a mile, just across the estuary of the Charles, shining in the morning sun, are the roofs and spires and chimneys of East Cambridge, always known in my younger days as Lechmere’s Point.  Judge Richard Lechmere was one of our old Cambridge Tories, whose property was confiscated at the time of the Revolution.  An engraving of his handsome house, which stands next to the Vassall house, long known as Washington’s headquarters, and since not less celebrated as the residence of Longfellow, is before me, on one of the pages of the pleasing little volume, “The Cambridge of 1776.”  I take it for granted that our Lechmeres were of the same stock as the owner of this property.  If so, he probably knows all that I could tell him about his colonial relatives, who were very grand people, belonging to a little aristocratic circle of friends and relatives who were faithful to their king and their church.  The Baroness Riedesel, wife of a Hessian officer who had been captured, was for a while resident in this house, and her name, scratched on a window-pane, was long shown as a sight for eyes unused to titles other than governor, judge, colonel, and the like.  I was tempted to present myself at Sir Edmund’s door as one who knew something about the Lechmeres in America, but I did not feel sure how cordially a descendant of the rebels who drove off Richard and Mary Lechmere would be received.