BY THE SAME AUTHOR. HISTORIC ODDITIES AND STRANGE EVENTS. Demy 8vo, 10s. 6d. [ Just published. ARMINELL : A Social Romance. 3 vols., crown 8vo. [ Now ready. SONGS OF THE WEST ; Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of Devon and Cornwall, with their Traditional Melodies, by Rev. S. Baring Gould , M.A., and Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard , M.A., arranged for voice and pianoforte. Parts I. and II., 3s. each, net . Parts III. and IV. in-preparation. STRANGE SURVIVALS AND POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. [ In Prepara

I WONDER whether the day will ever dawn on England when our country houses will be as deserted as are those in France and Germany? If so, that will be a sad day for England. I judge from Germany. There, after the Thirty Years' War, the nobles and gentry set-to to build themselves mansions in place of the castles that had been burnt or battered down. In them they lived till the great convulsion that shook Europe and upset existing conditions social as well as political. Napoleon overran Germany,

I N a certain wild and picturesque region of the west, which commands a noble prospect of Dartmoor, in a small but antique mansion, which we will call Grimstone, lived for generations a family called Grym. This family rose to consequence after the last heralds' visitation, consequently did not belong to the aboriginal gentry of the county. It produced a chancellor, and an Archbishop of Canterbury. The family mansion is still standing, with granite mullioned windows and quaint projecting porch, o

W HAT a feature in English scenery is the old country house! Compare the seat that has been occupied for many generations with the new mansion. The former with its embowering trees, its lawns and ancient oaks, its avenues of beech, the lofty, flaky Scotch pines in which the rooks build, and about which they wheel and caw; and the latter with new plantations, the evidence everywhere present of hedges pulled down, manifest in the trees propped up on hunches of clay. There is nothing so striking to

[ Listen ] [ PDF ] [ MusicXML ] OF NO class of men can it be more truly said that the good they do dies with them, and that the evil lives—in the memory of men—than the country parson. Of the thousands of old rectors and vicars of past generations, how they have all slipped out of the memory of men, have left no tradition whatever behind them, if they were good! but the few bad ones did so impress themselves on their generation, that the stories of their misconduct have been handed on, and are n

OF NO class of men can it be more truly said that the good they do dies with them, and that the evil lives—in the memory of men—than the country parson. Of the thousands of old rectors and vicars of past generations, how they have all slipped out of the memory of men, have left no tradition whatever behind them, if they were good! but the few bad ones did so impress themselves on their generation, that the stories of their misconduct have been handed on, and are not forgotten in a century. In th

[ Listen ] [ PDF ] [ MusicXML ] One of the very worst types of the hunting parson was that man Chowne, whom Mr. Blackmore has immortalized in his delightful story of The Maid of Sker . Many of the tales told in that novel relative to Chowne—the name of course is fictitious—are quite true. As I happen to know a good many particulars of the life of this man, I will here give them. He was rector of a wild lonely parish situated on high ground—ground so high that trees did not flourish about the rec

C LISTHENES, tyrant of Sicyon, says Herodotus, had a beautiful daughter whom he resolved to marry to the most accomplished of the Greeks. Accordingly all the eligible young men of Greece resorted to the court of Sicyon to offer for the hand of the lovely Agarista. Among these, the most distinguished was Hippoclides, and the king decided to take him as his son-in-law. Clisthenes had already invited the guests to the nuptial feast, and had slaughtered one hundred oxen to the gods to obtain a bless

P RACTICAL inconvenience attends living at the junction of the Is-not and the Is. To make myself better understood, I must explain. On October 11th, 1809, Colonel Mudge published the Ordnance Survey of the county which I grace with my presence. In that map he entered a Proposed Road , running about four miles from N. to S. through my property, and in front of my house. I was not alive at the time, so the expression "my house" is inexact, it was the house of my grandfather. This proposed road was

O NE day a very grand and, as she conceived, original idea came into my grandmothers head. She was resolved to represent pictorially, on a sheet of cartridge-paper, all the confluent streams of blood in her children's veins, of the families to which they were entitled to draw blood through past alliances. So my grandmother got out her ruler and colour-box, and a pallet and brushes, and filled a little glass with water. Presently a pedigree was drawn out by the aid of compasses and a parallel rul

T HE press and the railway are sweeping away all the old individualities and peculiarities that marked the country. It has been said, and said truly, that the railway has abolished everywhere in Europe a local cuisine , so that the traveller, whether in England, France, in Italy, Russia, at Constantinople, and even at Cairo, has the same menu at table-d'hôte . There was a time when, by travelling, you could pick up culinary ideas. That time is now past. You find exactly the same dishes, served i

I N the Vicar of Wakefield , the parsonage is visited periodically by a poor man of the name of Burchell. "He was fondest of the company of children, whom he used to call harmless little men. He was famous, I found, for singing them ballads and telling them stories.... He generally came for a few days into our neighbourhood once a year, and lived upon the neighbours' hospitality. He sat down to supper among us, and my wife was not sparing of her gooseberry wine. The tale went round; he sung us o

W HEN Doomsday Book was drawn up, there was but one female domestic servant in the county of Devon, that covers one million six hundred and fifty-five thousand acres. When I mentioned that fact to a lady of my acquaintance, she heaved a deep-drawn sigh, and said, "I wish I had lived in the times of Doomsday , and had not been the mistress of that one servant-maid." I believe that, were we lords of creation to have earlet holes communicating with our lady's bowers, as in the middle ages the ladie

T HE genuine Englishman loves a hunt, loves sport, above everything else; I do not mean only those who can afford to ride and shoot, but every Englishman born and bred in the country. One day the masons were engaged on my house, on the top of a scaffold, the carpenters were occupied within laying a floor, some painters were employed on doors and windows, the gardener was putting into a bed some roses; in the back-yard a youth was chopping up wood; in the stable-yard the coachman was washing the