widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up.  She made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and wainscoting.  “Do you call this a cottage?” I said to the woman when she came in with tea.  “No, I have it as a cottage, but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery,” she returned.  Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides.  “This then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay seventy or eighty years ago,” I said.  She had never heard of William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had some curious ideas about the land.

That settled it.  Blount was the name of Cobbett’s friend, and I had come to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to stay.  But how odd that my first thought of the man should have come to me when sitting by the fire where Cobbett himself had sat on many a cold evening!  And this was November the second, the very day eighty-odd years ago when he paid his first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first date he gives in Rural Rides.  And he too had been delighted with the place and the beauty of the surrounding country with the trees in their late autumn colours.  Writing on November 2nd, 1821, he says:  “The place is commonly called Uphusband, which is, I think, as decent a corruption of names as one could wish to meet with.  However, Uphusband the people will have it, and Uphusband it shall be for me.”  That is indeed how he names it all through his book, after explaining that “husband” is a corruption of Hurstbourne, and that there are two Hurstbournes, this being the upper one.

I congratulated myself on having been refused accommodation at the “George and Dragon,” and was more than satisfied to pass an evening without a book, sitting there alone listening to an imaginary conversation between those two curious friends.  “Lord Carnarvon,” says Cobbett, “told a man, in 1820, that he did not like my politics.  But what did he mean by my politics?  I have no politics but such as he ought to like.  To be sure I labour most assiduously to destroy a system of distress and misery; but is that any reason why a Lord should dislike my politics?  However, dislike them or like them, to them, to those very politics, the Lords themselves must come at last.”

Undoubtedly he talked like that, just as he wrote and as he spoke in public, his style, if style it can be called, being the most simple, direct, and colloquial ever written.  And for this reason, when we are aweary of the style of the stylist, where the living breathing body becomes of less consequence than its beautiful clothing, it is a relief, and refreshment, to turn from the precious and delicate expression, the implicit word, sought for high and low and at