and not to one another's talk. That youthful ghost now reads to a spectral brotherhood, not more dead now than then, to all the loveliness of life; and the porters come and go through their shadowy company, pushing their heavy trucks to and from the goods-vans, and from time to time the engines lift their strident voices above the monotonous silence of the reader's words; and all is very weird and sad.

What should have possessed us to drive beyond the Abbey Church to view "the quaint Dun Cow Inn," heaven knows; but that was what we did, and now I can testify that there is really an image of the Dun Cow standing over its door, and challenging the spectator for any associations he has with it. We had none, but I do not say it is not rich in associations for the betterinformed. Even we can suppose Coleridge stopping there, and perhaps not being able to pay for the milk it yielded, and so staying on till the youthful Hazlitt came and ordered the meal-in the essay where he has so divinely rendered the consciousness of "the gentleman in the parlor" waiting for his supper. We must have it that he paid the poet's bill; otherwise we should have seen him still pent and peering sadly from the window, with the image of the Dun Cow watching relentlessly overhead.

There are two bridges crossing the Severn at Shrewsbury: the English Bridge and the Welsh Bridge, by which the Briton and the Sassenach respectively went and came during the ages of border warfare before that last battle of the Roses. Now the bridges are used by travellers who wish to drink so deep of the Severn's beauty (in which the softly wooded shores are glassed as tenderly as a lover in his mistress' eyes), that they can never go away from Shrewsbury, but must remain

glad captives to the witchery of her wandering upand-down-hill streets, her Tudor houses, her beautiful churches, her enchanting remains of a past rich in insurpassable events and men. I say insurpassable to round my period; but there is no place in England that is not equally insurpassable in these things.

XIII

NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY

YREAT BRINGTON is the name of the village

neighborhood clustering about the church where, under the floor of the nave, the great-great-grandfather of George Washington lies buried. Little Brington is the village neighborhood, hardly separated from the other, where the Washington family dwelt in a house granted them by their cousin, Earl Spencer, when the events of the Civil War drove them from their ancestral place at Sulgrave. To reach the Bringtons from London you must first go to Northampton, where in his time the first Lawrence Washington was twice mayor. The necessity is not a hardship, for to see Northampton, ever so passingly, is a delight such as only English travel can offer. To drive the six miles from Northampton to the Bringtons is another necessity which is another delight, still richer if not greater. Be chosen by a 28th of September, veiled in a fog with sunny rifts in its veil, for your railroad run through a level pastoral scene where stemless blotches of trees shelter white blurs of sheep, and vague canal-boats rest cloudily on the unseen waterways, and you have conditions in which, if you are worthy, the hour of your journey will shrink to a few golden minutes. You will be meanwhile kept by the protecting mists from the manifold facts. which in England are apt to pierce you with a thousand

appeals and reproaches. The many much-storied places will be faded to wraiths of towers and gates and walls, and you will escape to your destination without that torment of regret for not having constantly stopped on the way from which nothing could otherwise deliver

you.

If at Northampton the fog lifts, and the autumnal sun has all the rest of the day to itself, you arrive with unimpaired strength for what you have come to see. Yet with all your energy conserved on the way, you will not be fully equal to the demand upon you. Northampton did not fail to begin with the Britons, and though it was not a permanent Roman station, and lay dormant during the Saxon hierarchy, it revived sufficiently under Saxon rule in the eleventh century to be twice taken and once burnt by the Danish invaders. It suffered under the Normans, but was walled and fortified in the Conqueror's reign, and began a new life with the inspiration of his oppressions. A picturesque incident of its civil history, which was early a record of resistance to the royal will, was Thomas à Becket's defiance of Henry II., when the King tried to reduce the proud churchman to the common obedience before the laws. The archbishop, followed by great crowds of the people, appeared as summoned, but when the Earl of Leicester bade him, in the old Norman form, hear the judgment rendered against him, he interrupted with the words, "Son and Earl, hear me first! I forbid you to judge me! I decline your tribunal, and refer my quarrel to the decision of the Pope." Then he retired, and shortly escaped to Flanders, but coming back to Canterbury, was murdered, as all men know, by four of the King's knights, at the altar in the cathedral.

Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the

prelate than against the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in Northampton, and the doctrines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a great battle was fought under the city's walls; ten thousand of Henry's "tall Englishmen" were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the Puritan garrison "plaid for about two hours" on "the cavaleers and shot about twenty of them" when they attempted to assault the place, which became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming victory ended the war against Charles.

If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line might very well have been, it was on the King's side. They put their faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia, to school them to the final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel. The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted citizens was accomplished in stuff other than that of the Puritan chief who soon after could "say this of Naseby,—that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men . . . I could not, riding alone about my business,