p, sown
and reaped, planted and drained, walked over, hunted over, and very much
beloved, for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land to
which its people have been stubbornly and tenderly devoted--still
"Shakespeare's England," still his favoured "isle set in the silver
sea."

As seen from the railway-carriage window, one is struck, too, by the
comparative tidiness of the English landscape. There are few loose ends,
and the outskirts of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps
which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of
trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes.
There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the
graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests
growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude,
but rather comes of, the greatest variety of individual character.

Herein the English village strikingly differs from the typical New
England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and
individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and
shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village
suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings,
placed on one level carpet of green, each with a definite number of
trees, and the very sunlight portioned out into gleaming allotments.
The effect gained is for me one of great charm--the charm of a vivid,
exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or
Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it
only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old
English village, where beauty has not been so much planned, as has just
"occurred."

Of course, this is the natural result of the long occupation of the
land. Each century in succession has had a hand in shaping the
countryside to its present aspect, and English history is literally a
living visible part of English scenery. Here the thirteenth century has
left a church, here the fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with
its suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey. Here is an inn where
Chaucer's pilgrims stopped on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field
covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessellated pavement which was
once the floor of an old country house occupied by one of Caesar's
generals.

Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling
Sou