AD.]

The pleasant little church over which White presided is as modest and
almost as attractive as his house. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary,
and measures fifty-four by forty-seven feet, being almost as broad as it
is long, consisting of three aisles, and making no pretensions, he says,
to antiquity. It was built in Henry VII.'s reign, is perfectly plain
and unadorned, and without painted glass, carved work, sculpture, or
tracery. Within it, however, are low, squat, thick pillars supporting
the roof, which he thinks are Saxon and upheld the roof of a former
church, which, falling into decay, was rebuilt on these massive props
because their strength had preserved them from the injuries of time.
They support blunt Gothic arches. He writes that he remembers when the
beams of the middle aisle were hung with garlands in honor of young
women of the parish who died virgins. Within the chancel is his memorial
on the wall, and he rests in an unassuming grave in the churchyard. The
belfry is a square embattled tower forty-five feet high, built at the
western end, and he tells pleasantly how the three old bells were cast
into four in 1735, and a parishioner added a fifth one at his own
expense, marking its arrival by a high festival in the village,
"rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble bell
should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with punch, of
which all present were permitted to partake." The porch of the church to
the southward is modern and shelters a fine Gothic doorway, whose
folding doors are evidently of ancient construction. The vicarage stands
alongside to the westward, an old Elizabethan house.

[Illustration: ROCKY LANE LEADING TO ALTON.]

[Illustration: THE WISHING STONE.]

Among the singular things in Selborne to which White calls attention are
two rocky hollow lanes, one of which leads to Alton. These roads have,
by the traffic of ages and the running of water, been worn down through
the first stratum of freestone and partly through the second, so that
they look more like water-courses than roads. In many places they have
thus been sunken as much as eighteen feet beneath the level of the
fields alongside, so that torrents rush along them in rainy weather,
with miniature cascades on either hand that are frozen into icicles in
winter. These lanes, thus rugged and gloomy, affright the timid, but,
gladly writes our author, they "delight the naturalist with their
various