tuate his name in long and pleasant
remembrance.

Oakham is a goodly and pleasant town, the chief and capital of
Rutlandshire. It has the ruins of an old castle in its midst, and
several interesting antiquities and customs. It, too, has its
unique speciality or prerogative. I was told that every person of
title driving through the town, or coming to reside within the
jurisdiction of its bye-laws, must leave his card to the authorities
in the shape of a veritable horse-shoe. It is said that the walls
of the old town hall are hung with these iron souvenirs of
distinguished visits; thus constituting a museum that would be
instructive to a farrier or blacksmith, as well as to the
antiquarian.

From Oakham I walked to Melton Mowbray, a cleanly, good-looking town
in Leicestershire, situated on the little river Eye. One cannot say
exactly in regard to Rutlandshire what an Englishman once said to
the authorities of a pigmy Italian duchy, who ordered him to leave
it in twenty-four hours. "I only require fifteen minutes," said
cousin John, with a look and tone which Jonathan could not imitate.
This rural county is to the shire-family of England what Rhode
Island is to the American family of States--the smallest, but not
least, in several happy characteristics.

I spent a quiet Sabbath in Melton Mowbray; attended divine service
in the old parish church and listened to two extemporaneous sermons
full of simple and earnest teaching, and delivered in a
conversational tone of voice. Here, too, the parish church was
seated in the midst of the great congregation which had long ceased
to listen to the call of its Sabbath bells. It was a beautiful and
touching arrangement of the olden time to erect the House of Prayer
in the centre of "God's Acre," that the shadow of its belfry and the
Sabbath voice of its silvery bells might float for centuries over
the family circles lying side by side in their long homes around the
sanctuary. There was a good and tender thought in making up this
sabbath society of the living and the dead; in planting the narrow
pathway between the two Sions with the white milestones of
generations that had travelled it in ages gone, leaving here and
there words of faith, hope and admonition to those following in
their footsteps. It is one of the contingencies of "higher
civilization" that this social economy of the churchyard, that
linked present and past generations in such touching and instructive
com