had good sport with the perch on Frensham great pond, and on some beautifully situated ponds not very far from it, then but little known to the public, but now, alas! 'opened up' and vulgarised by picnics-I mean Waggoners Wells, which lie on the right of the Portsmouth road, a little beyond Hindhead. I remember at Frensham, when I was about fifteen, standing on some piles which ran out into the water at the head of the pond, and having fine sport during a heavy thunderstorm. The perch came to the brandlings eagerly, and I landed four or five brace in the course of an hour, running in weight from a quarter of a pound to three-quarters. The lightning flashed and the thunder roared, but I was too engrossed with my rod to take much notice of either. Another time at Waggoners Wells I had equally good sport, though not under such exciting circumstances. But, after all, it was not with the intention of celebrating special days of sport, or even sport in particular, that I began this paper. I wrote it under the influence of that craving for the cool green English summer, with its meadows, its brooks, its tall tangled hedgerows, and its immemorial elms,' which, familiar to me years ago, revisit my imagination, as already stated, when what is called Midsummer is passed and what is truly Mid-summer approaches. If the three summer months extend from June 21 to September 21, August 1 is clearly the middle of them; and the weather usually corresponds to this suggestion. But the same walk which I have above described may be taken in November as well as August or September. The pike will then be in season, and the brook that I have in my mind's eye used to be famous for them. Of course, it did not breed monsters, but fish from eight to twelve pounds were frequently taken in it. But with these at the present moment we have nothing to do.

Isaac Walton was a great lover of Nature as well as of rod and line, and he and Gilbert White ought to be read together. They are our two leading examples of that combination of sporting tastes with a love of Nature and natural history, and the alliance of both with literature, which during the last century became so frequent and so popular as to cause Charles Kingsley to pronounce it the offspring of a tenth muse. And certainly one result of it has been to bring the sportsman more within the range of ideas to which he was formerly a stranger, and the man of letters and of culture more into sympathy with the sportsman than he was in the days of Addison and Johnson. Not, indeed, that the two

classes never intermingled at all. Pulteney and Carteret, accomplished scholars as well as distinguished statesmen, were both sportsmen, and shared this taste with Walpole and Grafton, who knew as little of art or letters as their own gamekeepers and huntsmen. White and Walton are the two fathers of sporting literature, and half their reputation depends upon the style in which they illustrated their favourite pursuits. For Walton, at all events, is no impeccable authority on the sport to which he was devoted. His errors have been pointed out by anglers of a later day. But he lives not in their report. Were his mistakes twice as numerous as they are said to be, it could not affect his position in the temple of fame. The Compleat Angler,' as has well been said, is not a text-book, but an idyll. And but for the absence of a milkmaid I should have called my own production by that name. But an idyll without a Galatea is a poor tale. I may add that I have never seen a milkmaid. I suppose that they existed in the golden age of Queen Elizabeth, who is said to have wished that she was one, and the merry days of Charles II., when, as the Tory foxhunter observed, we used to have such fine weather. And even now, perhaps, they may linger in sheltered nooks and corners, among the beautiful herds of Devonshire, or among the primitive inhabitants of the Welsh hills. But in central England I have looked for one in vain, and have been obliged to content myself with the milkmaid of poetry and fiction. For she, be it noted, is something more than only a maid who milks. She must be pretty, and neat, and clear-complexioned, and in the habit of regaling anglers with a song or a syllabub, or both. Neither Walton nor Sir Thomas Overbury could have invented her. There must really have been milkmaids once upon a time who, when going a-milking,' would tell an impertinent inquirer that their face was their fortune, and when he declined to marry on that endowment only replied that nobody 'axed' him. But, alas these fair visions have left the earth-the earth, at least, that I know and I can only place them in imagination alongside of the mermaid and other fabulous animals, as old Weller would have called them. Walton's milkmaid seems to have been a pretty and agreeable young person, and to have attracted warmer admiration from Piscator's scholar' than the master thought becoming. The milkmaid of living reality in the twentieth century need fear no such attentions.

T. E. KEBBEL.

'I HAVE lived,' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford.'

Burford,' he says, with that magnificent nonchalance of the creative imagination which calls things that are not as though they were, for the place Stevenson had in his mind was not Burford at all, but a little Surrey hamlet called Burford Bridge. As everybody knows, the boat did put off from the Queen's Ferry, and the 'dear cargo' was that very pretty gentleman Mr. Balfour, of Shaws; but I for one am glad that Burford Bridge never took its place, by virtue of any rattle at the shutters, in the world of imaginative story, or it might have gone more hardly still with the real Burford, whose romantic history would have been sunk still deeper in oblivion. Ah, if only our younger wizard of the north had known the true Burford! How it would have tugged at his spirit! 'The inn at Burford,' he says. At the beginning of last century there were still seventeen inns at Burford to a population of fourteen hundred persons, and earlier there were more; so he would have had a fair field of choice for the scene of his tragic errand. And they were inns at which events not only might have happened, but did happen. Here are a few entries from the Register of Burials :

1617, 2 Jan., Wm. Hall, kilde with a pot at the Bull.

1620, 31 Jan., Robert Tedder, a stranger, stabde with a knife

at the George by one Pottley, at the race.

1622, 25 June, Thomas Hughe, stabde at the Swann.

'1626, William Bacster, gent. sometymes of Norfolke and in

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that sheir borne, and now belonging to the lord Morden was slaine at the George, the next day after the race, and buried 6 Nov.'

The race for the King's plate, on the magnificent downs stretching Bibury way over the Gloucestershire border, was one of the things which made Burford famous right down to the middle of last century, and was one cause of the many inns in the town and the many burials in the churchyard. Of course, by itself the stabbing in a drunken brawl, even of a 'gent. sometymes of Norfolke,' furnishes inadequate material for the tragic muse; but passions thus violently purged had no doubt often their first occasion in more romantic circumstances.

But if we come to the period of the Civil War, how the inn shutters might-nay, must-have been made to rattle. On the night of June 20, 1644, no less a person than Charles I. was lodged at the George' on his way back to Oxford; it not being agreeable to him to become the guest of the lord of the manor, none other than the Honourable William Lenthall, Esquire, Speaker of the House of Commons, who ten years before had bought Burford Priory of Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland. Or, again, at the very beginning of the struggle, as Sir John Byron lay in Burford on his way to join Lord Hertford, a party of Parliamentary troopers rode in from Cirencester, on a frosty night, and found unexpected guests at the 'White Hart,' who gave the alarm, and after some hard fighting drove the troopers off. The parish register contains the consequent entry: Sixe soldiers slaine in Burford & buried the 2 Januarij.' Or, again, later, on May 3, 1645, Rupert was here with two thousand foot and horse on his way to visit the King at Oxford, and there is an entry in the register which is not without tragic suggestion :

'George Rowley, an officer in Prince Rupert his army, dyeing of a wound received, was buried ye eight of May.'

Who gave Master Rowley his wound? There were no Parliamentary armies nearer than Newbury. It is, however, four years later still, when Cromwell has taken the place of Charles as the centre of romantic interest, that Burford becomes the very focus of events. Those premature advocates of the Law of Nature and the Rights of Man, unhandsomely denounced by the commonplace Englishman as 'Levellers,' had mutinied against their officers in several regiments, and it was at Burford that they

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received their death-blow from the iron hand of the LieutenantGeneral, who captured here between three and four hundred, and shut them up in the church, while a council of war deliberated about their punishment. In this émeute we are told that 'some, refusing to surrender, made good an inn, out of which they made about sixteen shot; one of them was killed and two or three wounded.' From the Burial Register we learn that this inn was 'the Crowne '— a name of evil omen for the enemies of monarchy-now the Lamb at the corner of Priory Lane and Sheep Street. The council of war decided that all the prisoners were guilty of death, and this decision, in the words of the official pamphlet, so prevailed upon their spirits that a greater appearance of ingenuity, confession, and sorrow hath not been found amongst men in judging and aggravating their own offence.' They drew up a petition to the Lord General Fairfax, declaring 'the odious wickedness of their Fact,' and entreating His Excellency to extend the bowels of his tender compassion towards them in omitting the execution of his most just sentence, and inflicting such other punishment upon them which they were able to bear.' In the event four ringleaders, Cornet Thompson, Cornet Dean, and two corporals, Church and Perkins, were sentenced to death, and three were shot against the churchyard wall (May 18, 1649), while the other prisoners looked on from the roof of the church; Cornet Dean being respited at the last moment. From a tract called 'The Levellers (falsely so called) vindicated, by a faithful remnant that hath not yet bowed the knee unto Baal,' we learn that Dean was suspected with some reason of having betrayed his brethren; and though it hurt them that Cromwell, who had stood by to see Cornet Tomson, Master Church, and Master Perkins murthered,' should afterwards come to them in the church and make his old manner of dissembling speeches,' it hurt them still more that the 'wretched Judas Dean' should be sent to them' to preach apostasy in the pulpit, howling and weeping like a crocodile.' The lead of the church font still bears an inscription, 'Anthony Sedley Prisner, 1649,' and the bullet marks on the churchyard wall are still shown to the faithful pilgrim.

The purpose of these brief reminiscences is to make an appeal. Will not one of our romantic storytellers-in the CORNHILL I shall be understood as referring to Mr. Stanley Weyman, and Mr. A. E. W. Mason, and to these I will take the liberty of adding Mr. Meade Falkner, whose 'nebuly coat' I see in a window of Burford Church-will not some inheritor of the tradition of R. L. S. under