he eaves would fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of that
grave had desired to creep under the church-wall. On closer inspection,
we found an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty
made out this forlorn verse:--

"Poorly lived,
And poorly died,
Poorly buried,
And no one cried."

It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life,
death, and burial into fewer words, or more impressive ones; at least,
we found them impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the
inscription by scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced
letters. The grave was on the shady and damp side of the church, endwise
towards it, the head-stone being within about three feet of the
foundation-wall; so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he must have
been doubled up to fit him into his final resting-place. No wonder that
his epitaph murmured against so poor a burial as this! His name, as well
as I could make it out, was Treeo,--John Treeo, I think,--and he died in
1810, at the age of seventy-four. The gravestone is so overgrown with
grass and weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and crumbly with
time and foul weather, that it is questionable whether anybody will ever
be at the trouble of deciphering it again. But there is a quaint and sad
kind of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my pen may do
it) the probabilities of oblivion for poor John Treeo, and asking a
little sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and making him
better and more widely known, at least, than any other slumberer in
Lillington church-yard: he having been, as appearances go, the outcast
of them all.

You find similar old churches and villages in all the neighboring
country, at the distance of every two or three miles; and I describe
them, not as being rare, but because they are so common and
characteristic. The village of Whitnash, within twenty minutes' walk of
Leamington, looks as secluded, as rural, and as little disturbed by the
fashions of to-day, as if Doctor Jephson had never developed all those
Parades and Crescents out of his magic well. I used to wonder whether
the inhabitants had ever yet heard of railways, or, at their slow rate
of progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches. As you
approach the village, while it is yet unseen, you observe a tall,
overshadowing canopy of elm-tree tops, beneath which you almost hesitate
to follow the public road, on account of th