ping Agnes Abbott twice [poor Agnes!] 28. 4d; paid to whipping four women 48," probably a reduction on taking a quantity. The women were stripped to the waist and flogged down the chief streets and about the marketplace until the red blood flowed. The average price for whipping such was a shilling, but, though man will do much for reward, it was sometimes difficult to find a parishioner who would flog a neighbor; we are clanny in the west, you know. And for that reason, perhaps, there was no love lost between clan and clan; the next parish was only too ready to supply a whipster for our sinners. So local, indeed, were we that roguish men and women from a distance, whom we called "foreigners," were quickly dealt with and so little esteemed that we whipped them at a cheaper rate. Again, we are to-day rightly tender to the sick; but in the old days in Wessex we confined persons with infectious diseases in the lock-up, and whipping was held to be good for them. Should the sick be loud in lament, at which now I do not wonder, the watchman kept them quiet by this popular discipline, and our rich neighbor the borough, which kept its records as if it were proud of them, once "paid T. Hawkins for whipping two people that had the small pox, 8d." Yes, the spirit of this age is different from that.

But to pass to such of the material side of things as we of to-day have from them of yesterday. Let us walk down this quiet street as it winds in slow keeping with our pace and with ever so gentle a curve. On either hand are our Wessex homes, cottages with purple roofs splashed with the green of moss and starred with the pink of wild convolvulus. Some have mere "lights" for windows and some the long low casements pillared with mullions of our good golden sandstone. Few are there without a jungle of

sweet Williams, stocks, hollyhocks, lavender, larkspurs, sweet-briars and roses between house and garden-wall, and through the latticed gate we see how clumps of bloom beset the narrow path. But putting aside this annual pageant of the summer, we shall note that the houses are little changed in their main points from what they were a hundred and fifty years ago. The walls are not often built of stone; oak was too plentiful and cheap before the wars with France swept the country of it for our ships. I know great expanses of land about here which to-day are bare of trees or have been planted in modern times with firs or strange new pines from the world below the sea, which bore then good broad oaks in great number. The village builders would use the local stone as a foundation and then above it they raised walls which were either made of what we in the west country call cob-that is to say, marl or mud mixed up with chopped straw-or of oak-timbers filled in with mud plaster which they used to spread on reeds of spear-grass, and not on laths, as the journeymen do now. Then there was no ceiling to any but a very superior house-such as would hold the ladies who heightened their hoods and widened their hoops according to the passing mode. In all other houses the flooring of the room above and the beams on which it rested formed the ceiling of the chief rooms and they all-beams, joists, and flooring-were of oak, whitewashed. The roof itself was of good oak, overlaid with "healing stones"; hundreds of houses in Wessex still carry such a roof and sound as a bell it rings, though two or three centuries old. All this oak framework (good to last and only less slow to burn than elm) cost little. That of the vicarage of our borough, which was burnt in the disorders nearly two centuries back, cost but twelve pounds to replace. And

this reminds me that one of the badges of our Wessex aldermen was a large hook with a leather thong. It was a badge of civic duty, seeing that it was intended for nothing else than pulling down the beams and tronpieces of a house when it caught fire, which it did more often than enough.

This brings me to our Wessex chimney-places, so wide and welcome. They did not develop suddenly, for chimneys at first were seldom to be found and stone chimneys still more rarely. Two hundred years ago most of our people here heaped their fire against the wall of the living room, made a hole in the outside wall, and over the fire built the deep projecting fireplace, which was roomy enough to catch the smoke and hold the chilly inmates. This fireplace was just built of mud, plaster and wood, and often became a danger to the house. Indeed, our people were constantly being fined for not "amending their mantells." Why mantells? I wonder; though I do not know unless the old custom of fixing pegs all round this spacious fireplace, on which the wet cloaks were hung to dry, stood sponsor for the name. There are hundreds of such early fireplaces in Wessex to-day, but three or four generations ago a half-chimney was built up outside, from the hole upwards, as a concession to the times that were even then advancing. And, of course, most of our houses had ovens. A public baker was an almost unknown person, and to this day there are large villages round us where he has not yet been found. Those dear old Dryasdusts (whom we love for their patience and their pride in Wessex) tell us that querns (hand mills for grinding corn) are associated with the prehistoric Briton; but all the time we know that querns were used in the west until quite recently. In the century before the one just gone the lord of our manor often fined those of us who

were his tenants for using these querns instead of bringing their corn to be ground at his mill.

It is strange, seeing the intimate terms on which we live with our furniture, how seldom it reflects in knob or twist our local bias or our racial egoisms. Even Chippendale, when he had done borrowing from the French, went so far afield as China for his models. But here in Wessex, we can easily go back beyond the days of the earlier style of Chippendale. In all the better houses round about us, there is much of that good oak furniture which was wrought by honest workmen during the century preceding Chippendale and whose history is still unwritten. Few of us suspect that in these out-of-the-way places a great collection may easily be made of oak chairs, tables, settles, bureaux and dressers, simple and symmetrical and so honest and consistent as to be worthy to rank as a "school" of such woodcraft. There was no great variety, it is true, in the furniture of our farmhouses. There were no carpets, and the curtains were mere flounces along the windows. Until quite lately plaited rushes were strewed upon the floor and oak shutters kept out night and unduly curious persons. Oaken, too, was the furniture, nor was it upholstered. Chairs, tables, chests, dressers, settles (what a power of harmony rests in a settle and how redolent is it of the tales of our forefathers), stools, hanging cupboards and four-posted bedsteads exhaust the list; but everything was good and sound and the whole was enough. You can still see it all-here and to-day. But I think the housewife made cushions and that she stuffed them with wool of her own carding and spinning-arts in which our women excelled; and I am sure there were one or two featherbeds about, though most people, it is true, slept on straw pallets. This may

seem a bare inventory, but it was a great advance on earlier days. For, some considerable time before this, when people were taxed on the gross value of every article they owned, the tax-gatherer in our district, even with that keen scent common to his class, failed to discover in our blacksmith's house anything more than two stools, a trestle table, a basin and ewer, and andirons in his living room; in his chamber, two beds-not bedsteads-and two towels; and in his kitchen a pot, a trivet and two saucepans! But in the more recent days furniture was ample of its kind and sound withal, and from the point of view of health the absence of upholstery was preferable to that preponderance of it which afflicts us now.

I do not think that Wessex breeds cooks easily. Those of us who are not too Keltic are at any rate too Saxon to achieve kickshaws. The fine art of cooking comes by nature, and, in western Europe at least, is monopolized by the Latin peoples. But what we had of food we had in plenty, and, although distress spread wide, and quickly became acute when harvest failed, as a general rule even the poorest in our west country had enough to eat. Beef, mutton, pork, fish (for Wessex lies between two seas and we are a sea-faring people), cabbage and bread formed the staple of the prospering poor, while the more fortunate added venison, capons, chickens and wild fowl to this diet. For the last two hundred years, a loin of mutton stewed and served in a thick broth has been a favorite west country dish. I am afraid we habitually overate (and over-drank) ourselves, but we loved plenty and our hands were open. When some Wessex lord kept high festival, the scene was Gargantuan. At a great junketing which was held one hundred and fifty years ago at Ford House, not far from here, this was the provision for the guests: One hundred

and forty partridges, seventy-one turkeys, one hundred and twelve chickens, two hundred and fifty-eight larks, three deer, six oxen, five sheep and "two and a half calves." It is quite worth pointing out that this feast was as remarkable for the variety as for the abundance of the provender. For in addition to the foregoing there were also cooked and eaten mallards, plovers, sea-larks, pea-hens, gulls and curlews. And shell-fish was much accounted of in those days, for our neighboring borough provided for the judges, as they passed through on circuit, what they then called "a treat," one which surely must have been remembered, seeing that it consisted of thirty lobsters, as many crabs, a hundred scallops, three hundred oysters andfifty oranges.

The men of Wessex have long been credited with a particular capacity for liquor, which with the mead they still drink in some of our villages I think they inherit from the earliest wassailing times. Of all drinks, of course the cheapest and most plentiful were cider and beer. Then came ale, not the mild "dinner beverage" of to-day, but good strong old beer, which was drunk out of long wine-glasses by the rich for many years after. Such glasses are still to be met with in our houses and old inns, and sometimes, but with increasing rareness, the oldfashioned ale. We did not traffic much in wine, though canary, malaga, claret and sack had each their vogue and were not expensive. In the days of our grandfathers' great-grandfathers canary was two shillings and claret a shilling a quart, and at any entertainment the cost of wine bore a pro portion to the whole bill very different from that it bears now. Sherry, by the way, was scarcely known with us till the middle of the eighteenth century, and just before then, too, punch begins to figure in the old bills.

But cider and small beer were then, as now, the great drink of the west country. To-day I can go into the villages of our beautiful Wessex and behind many a cottage and farmhouse find the old cider-house of those days and, still standing within it, the massive oak cider-press and "vollyer" and troughs. Now as then, those heaps of streaked and ruddy apples which are lying out in the orchard, under the gray trunks and limbs of the trees, twinkling brightly on the tufted grass, are earefully gathered up by willing hands and turned into hogsheads of sweet cider. The village ale-houses hereabout have few spirit-licences between them -that trade is chiefly with the passerby who belongs elsewhere. "A mug o' zoider" is the constant call; "a pot o' beer" ranks next to it-pot, because at one time they were literally stone pots and, I regret to say, even then "made in Germany." Elsewhere in England beer was the chief, almost the only beverage of the country people, and later, in the eighteenth century, Dorset beer became famous and popular, if strong; for a great philosopher of that time, who came a journey into our west country, somewhat unwisely (but for our amusement) recorded in his diary its influence on him: "I found the effect of last night's drinking that foolish Dorset, which was pleasant enough, but did not at all agree with me, for it made me very stupid all day." But during the last two centuries and even to-day in our more western villages, cider has been and remains supreme. So far back as the days of the merry Charles cider was needed to keep pace with the rebound in temperament and so came to the front. And when that unhappy son of Lucy Walters, the Duke of Monmouth, staked his all and lost it at Sedgemoor, which is a day's ride from here, the farmers from everywhere round sent countless hogsheads to the

King's forces as welcome gifts. Up to that time the apples had been so carelessly grown that the cider was called "mordicant," and sharp indeed it must have been, if we can realize that the sharp cider we make to-day is sweet beside it. But greater pride in the local liquor made our forefathers excel in its making, and it began to be so popular amongst the Wessex squires that it came to the dignity of being bottled. So great indeed grew the demand that in a village which lies apparently asleep on the side of a hill that drops for two long miles down to the vale of Blackmore, no fewer than ten thousand hogsheads have been brewed in one year. Nor is cider quite the mild drink some people imagine it to be. Many a brawny giant of Wessex succumbs to its too potent charm, though now and again you may chance upon a seasoned veteran who, as he lifts the blue mug which is here sacred to cider, will tell you with a sly twinkle in his round gray eyes, "Lor, bless 'ee, zurr, Oi doant drinky vor drunky; Oi do-a drinky vor dry."

It is not until well on in "the teacup times of hood and hoop" that I discover "corphee" in the West Country, when it was on sale at Dorchester, though some of the richer people probably had it earlier. Of course it took time for new fashions to travel down from London, for Wessex was a wild country and far and the road between us worse than bad. But "the China drink, called by the Chineans Teha, by other nations tay alias tee," came to us before coffee, and was drunk in our great houses soon after the Restoration.

At this time our peasants ate their food off "treene" or wooden trenchers or platters, which were generally made of beech. In the days of good Queen Anne these could be bought at Ilminster Fair (and many another) for eight