ry to keep
the church door locked, to prevent damage, thefts, etc. "Have you never
had anything stolen?" I asked him. Yes, once, a great many years ago,
the church plate had been taken away in the night. But it was recovered:
the thief had taken it to the top of the hill and thrown it into the
dewpond there, no doubt intending to take it out and dispose of it at
some more convenient time. But it was found, and had ever since then
been kept safe at the vicarage. Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal
was kept in the church. He had never locked it, but once in his fifty
years it had been locked against him by the churchwardens. This
happened in the days of the Joseph Arch agitation, when the agricultural
labourer's condition was being hotly discussed throughout the country.
The vicar's heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard
these conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes. He
took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a way that
offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in the district. The
church wardens, who were farmers, then locked him out of his church,
and for two or three weeks there was no public worship in the parish of
Coombe. Doubtless their action was applauded by all the substantial
men in the neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were
unsubstantial didn't matter. That storm blew over, but its consequences
endured, one being that the inflammatory parson continued to be regarded
with cold disapproval by the squires and their larger tenants. But the
vicar himself was unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried
in what he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that a
quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken that extreme
course said to him, "We locked you out of your own church, but years
have brought me to another mind about that question. I see it in a
different light now and know that you were right and we were wrong."

Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and entertainer and
continued my rural ride. From Coombe it is five miles to Hurstbourne
Tarrant, another charming "highland" village, and the road, sloping
down the entire distance, struck me as one of the best to be on I had
travelled in Hampshire, running along a narrow green valley, with oak
and birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours growing
on the slopes on either hand. Probably the beauty of the scene, o