Country Life
ARCADIA REVISITED.
Revisiting a very rural district in England, familiar to me many years ago in its most intimate details, I found changes almost startling in their social aspect beneath a singularly constant surface. The church towers and spires, as beautiful as any in the world, stand as ever "bosomed high in tufted trees." The villages cluster round them as of old ; and though in the fields is more grass and less corn, yet the alter- nation of crops of gold with cattle feeding on rough grasses has the same effect on the eye. The extreme richness of this harvest, especially marked on the land of heavy clay where Northampton and Huntingdon approach one another, help perhaps to conceal the rather thinner cultivation of the average farm. The people are little changed too. Here are old folk who look not so very different at eighty from their remembered appearance at fifty or sixty. They are what they were : hard-working, honest, sensible, natural, and kindly.
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