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haymakers in the meadows-the very poetry of labour; the reapers in the cornfields, the ripe yellow crop waving round them like a golden sea; and after them the picturesque gleaners come, beloved of artists, and yet happily not wholly extinct. For over three thousand eventful years have the gleaners gathered the remnant of the harvest fields; but soon we shall lose them for ever-another pictorial feature of country life promises speedily to vanish, and to live only in memory, for the scientific reapingmachine, that does its work so well, makes their task a fruitless one. Then there is the sheep-shearing, the ploughman behind his slow-travelling team turning up the red soil, and all the other numerous and everchanging proceedings, varying as the months progress. It is a perpetual delight to watch all these, they never weary or fail to interest the observer. There is no hurry or bustle about the goings on of a farm-there is something idyllic and eminently peace-bestowing in watching the doings of the rustic toilers; they are picturesque objects in themselves, and their surroundings are healthful, pleasant, and beautiful.

To the left of this farmstead the land dropped down, and in a wooded hollow nestled a little village, half drowned in luxuriant foliage; a sparkling silvery stream crossed by a grey old bridge, and swelling hills beyond, completed a rural picture as charming as the eye of artist ever gazed upon. How curious the fact that, for ages past, painters never thought of giving us the simple beauty of the green earth and changeful sky for the sake of their

charms alone-merely as a background for their pictures did they consider these. Now our eyes are opened, and we love the landscape for its own sake. Scott and Wordsworth, by their poems and writings, have had much to do with our modern appreciation of the beauties of Nature; then came the prose wordpainting of Ruskin, and a new revelation was given to us. Even in our novels now we demand faithful and studied descriptions of scenery-descriptions that our forefathers would not have had the patience to read, much less enjoy; and it is well it is so. A new pleasure is brought to all the rich as well as the poor, and one that is inexhaustible, for though the wealthy few may own the land, scenery is the special property of none. Landscape, seascape, and cloudscape, how each and all abound in endless beauties and untold loveliness! and the love of Nature, once acquired, is a lasting one. The English landscape, with its soft clouded skies, its mellowed prospects, its colourful distances, how bewitchingly beautiful it is! for a moist climate is the most charming of all. Our insular atmosphere has a special quality about it a drier one never can possess: we view the near and far distance through a space of reflective moistureladen air, which has the same quality in relation to scenery that wet has to a pebble-it brings its colours out, besides softening and tenderly harmonising all things. An English mountain ten miles off looks as far away-it is not outlined unpictorially sharp against the sky, with details all disagreeably clear and pronounced-as though it were only a mile or so removed from the spectator, save, of course, for

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size. For this climatic cause, in sketching in California nothing worried me so much as the apparent nearness of the distance; it would not stand back, it so asserted itself as to destroy all feeling of space. Nature there is in an intensely pre-Raphaelite mood.

A few miles farther on our road a wayside cottage, more roof than wall, attracted our attention, and by a painted board upon it we learnt that it was Smeeth post-office. Though merely a cottage, it was mightily built, its red-tiled roof reaching on either side to within a few feet of the ground, a great chimney going up the centre; the upper projecting story was weather-tiled, creepers grew on the walls, and homely old-fashioned flowers flourished in the little garden in front-altogether a cottage of a kind to be found only in southern England.

What a feature the builders of old made of their roofs! These in their structures always strike you first, next the chimneys, then, last of all, the body of the building. These grand old high-pitched roofs have, however, one objection, if objection it can be rightly termed, and this is that the chimneys must be built in the centre or wreathed in a number together for mutual strength and support, otherwise the height of a single one, if coming from an outer wall, causes it to be weak and unfitted to withstand in safety a strong storm of wind, and all good building must first of all be strong. The men of old never made this mistake, but modern alterations have frequently been made and chimneys thus thoughtlessly added. So, we noticed, it had been in this case, and the wrong construction had evidently given way at