This happened in the days of the Joseph Arch agitation, when the agricultural labourer’s condition was being hotly discussed throughout the country.  The vicar’s heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard these conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes.  He took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in the district.  The church wardens, who were farmers, then locked him out of his church, and for two or three weeks there was no public worship in the parish of Coombe.  Doubtless their action was applauded by all the substantial men in the neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were unsubstantial didn’t matter.  That storm blew over, but its consequences endured, one being that the inflammatory parson continued to be regarded with cold disapproval by the squires and their larger tenants.  But the vicar himself was unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried in what he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that a quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken that extreme course said to him, “We locked you out of your own church, but years have brought me to another mind about that question.  I see it in a different light now and know that you were right and we were wrong.”

Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and entertainer and continued my rural ride.  From Coombe it is five miles to Hurstbourne Tarrant, another charming “highland” village, and the road, sloping down the entire distance, struck me as one of the best to be on I had travelled in Hampshire, running along a narrow green valley, with oak and birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours growing on the slopes on either hand.  Probably the beauty of the scene, or the swift succession of beautiful scenes, with the low sun flaming on the “coloured shades,” served to keep out of my mind something that should have been in it.  At all events, it was odd that I had more than once promised myself a visit to the very village I was approaching solely because William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now no thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in my mind.

Arrived at the village I went straight to the “George and Dragon,” where a friend had assured me I could always find good accommodations.  But he was wrong:  there was no room for me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes.  She appeared to resent it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time, when the “shooting gents” from town required all the rooms available.  Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her:  couldn’t she direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed?  No, she couldn’t—­it is always so; but after the third time of asking she unfroze so far as to say that perhaps they would take me in at a cottage close by.  So I went, and a poor kind