so, in the village councils. names that [eration: "I acknowledge one baptism are fast becoming extinct in the neigh-for the remission of sins." The latter borhood. Outsiders inhabit the old part of this sentence our Protestant homes, while

Year by year the landscape grows
Familiar to the stranger's child.

One

friend would never utter. She always recited the creed in a firm and distinct voice, not infrequently beating time to the periods with her eye-glass, but It is with feelings of genuine regret having arrived at the objectionable conthat one thinks of the old familiar fession, she would stop, shut her lips faces. They were a kindly people, tightly with a smack of orthodox dethose honest yeomen and their families, termination, and stand motionless, and masterful withal. They took their until, the unsound words being finished, part in the affairs of the parish, and she would re-commence with renewed what they did they did well. Even the energy, both of voice and action, and Sunday-schools were but little trouble end with a very loud "Amen." in those days. For twenty-five years Sunday morning a terrible thing hapthey were superintended by a maiden pened. The schoolgirls — who in their lady, tall, stately, and determined, white caps and tippets formed the whose symbol of authority was an choir and sat on benches in the chancel umbrella. Absolute order reigned. A tap upon the floor with the said umbrella would produce immediate silence. Once only was the signal disregarded, when the daring culprit found himself seized by the collar and ignominiously ejected. We were stern Protestants in those days, and no semblance of popery could be tolerated. It was bad enough that the church bells should break the silence of the Sabbath; they should not be allowed to disturb the solemnity of the weekly prayer-meeting. Well, it happened one night that just as the meeting had begun in an ancient attic overlooking the churchyard, the beautiful peal of eight bells rung out in the frosty air. It was more than any Protestant could be expected to put up with. And what is more, they would not put up with it. And so, with calm determination, the stately lady arose from her knees on the attic floor, and laid hold of her faithful umbrella; and then, marching with great dignity to Very simple were the services in the Norman belfry, she ordered every those bygone days, but let no one say one of the eight ringers out of church. that they were not attended, and well The men fled before the dread symbol attended. The complaint, now so often of authority. Then, locking the door heard, of the absence of men from behind her, she returned to her devo- church could not then be made. Why, tions, with the church key in her ample the tramp of the laborers, as they pocket. There is one clause, or rather marched into church at the ceasing of a portion of a clause, in the Nicene the bell to their block of benches in the Creed, which always seemed to the north-west corner of the nave, was like good people of the parish to savor of that of a company of soldiers. They the popish doctrine of baptismal regen-came to church on Sunday afternoons

obeying some mysterious order, actually dared to commit the heinous sin of turning to the east at the recital of the creed. The movement caught the good lady's eye. Not a moment was to be lost; the very existence of the Protestant religion was at stake. So, seizing her trusty friend, she marched out of her pew and into the chancel, and with wonderful alacrity she caught hold of each child's arm with the hook of her umbrella, and twisted them all swiftly round before they had recited six sentences of the creed. Such downright popery was never again attempted, at least in her lifetime. It is no doubt done now, and perhaps the little girls in their white caps and tippets have given way to coarse boys in cassocks and surplices - or should I say to fair-haired choristers ?—but the good lady is at rest on the sunny slope of the old churchyard, and such doings do not trouble her there.

66

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The future world, with them was divided into two states, each fixed at the moment of death, and endless. One was spoken of as the good place; "the other was only hinted at as t'other." When old Betty Johnson died, she what had a nasty tongue, that she had,' they came to the charitable conclusion that if "she had a-gone to the good place, she didn't ought."

as regularly as they went to work on Monday mornings. It never seemed to occur to them to stop away. Some would come, across the heavy clay fields, from hamlets two and three and even four miles away. It is true that they did not always respond throughout the service, but then not one in ten could read a single line; sometimes perhaps they continued sitting when they ought to have stood; and now and then, it A sad tragedy once happened in the might be, on a warm summer's after- quiet village. A poor woman drowned noon, or after a mug of Sunday ale at herself and her baby in a tiny stream the Green Man, they would doze off to that runs through the further end of sleep for a moment, but only for a mo- the village. Before long some were to ment. Old Master Hills, the dog-rapper, be found who had "heard tell as how " was at hand, and down would come his there was 66 summat" to be seen every long stick on the thick skull of the sleep- night at a certain hour. So-and-so had ing rustic, with a crack that echoed "seed" it. Now, exactly opposite to through the building. Many a time the scene of the tragedy there stood a have I heard that sound, and I can see picturesque old cottage, with a wellnow the spare form of the old man as kept garden in front of it, in which he perambulated up and down the cottage lived an old lady of the name of church during the sermon. He has Mrs. Dodd. Now, Mrs. Dodd felt inbeen dead now these five-and-twenty jured at the talk of the village. She years past, and his office, once recog-lived opposite the haunted stream, and nized in almost every parish, has become extinct. It is also true that we did not "hold" with over much music during the service, and that we said the "Amens" like good Protestants, while, as for the responses, we were nobly led by the aged clerk, who occupied his desk beneath the pulpit. But the laborers came to church in those days.

if any one saw "it," she ought to. But in spite of sitting up, and looking out of the window at all hours of the night, she saw nothing more alarming than the white rails of the rustic bridge and the stunted bushes at the water's edge. And so she came to the conclusion that there was "nought to be

seen."

"Ghosts!" the old lady would say in scorn, "I don't hold with 'em. If so be as that 'ere woman hev a-gone to the good place, 'taint likely as how she be wishful to a-waddle in that 'ere old ditch" and then, with a solemn voice and a shake of her bouy finger, she would add, "and if she've a-gone to t'other, she'll be kep' there."

as

Many were the superstitions which lingered among the older inhabitants of the village. The churchyard especially was regarded with feelings of awe, and few even of the younger generation cared to cross it after dark. It was not what they had seen, but what they might see, that caused them to shun it. If asked their reasons for avoiding it, A firm belief in "the very old un,' "" they would only shake their heads and a real and ever-present personage, was say, with a grin, as "how they shouldn't a most distinctive article of the rustic like; " while the ancient dames in the creed. Everything that went wrong, almshouses would solemnly declare that from the tragedy of a suicide to a fit of they "had their feelin's, and didn't indigestion, was laid directly at his want to see their old men." "There door. "I feels bad; and I don't know was no tellin'," they said, "what folks' how I feels," an old woman would say. speerits might not be up to, if so be as "You depent on't, dear, that's that 'ere they hadn't gone to the good place." old Satan a-trying of ye," a sympathizThe old ladies were fond of speculating ing neighbor would reply. on the fate of their departed neighbors.

"He's at

the bottom of everythink," as Mrs.

Dodd would say, "and the worst of it | wistfully that he would like, if so be
is, that there's no catching 'im; but if the Lord was a-willin', just to go once
once I could a-get hold on 'im, I'd pun- more a-hobblin' down of the Barful
ish 'im."
road, and look on the green 'arth."
"Niver no more, Master French," re-
peated the old woman, "niver, till
you're took to yer long home." Under
the circumstances, what could old Mas-
ter French do but depart in peace, and
be content with being carried down the
"Barful" road to his long sleep in the
green churchyard ?

By the roadside, not far from the old Elizabethan mansion, there may be noticed a small depression in the pathway, to which local superstition assigns a curious history. The old folk will tell you—that is, if you can get them to talk about it - that it marks the spot where, many years previously, a young farmer was thrown from his horse and killed. Since then every attempt to level the ground has failed. Many a time has it been tried, but always with the same result. The next morning the hole will be open as before. So at least the old folk say; and that the depression may be seen, or at any rate might be seen a few years back, the most sceptical could not deny.

"Another article of their belief was in "tokens of folks' end." A few years ago some workmen were engaged in removing an old building which had served as a dove-cot to successive generations of pigeons ever since the time when William Kempe busied himself with his fish-ponds. As the men were eating their breakfasts the family butler appeared, and asked one of them, Jim Suckling by name, what he had been doing in the walled garden half an hour before. Jim denied that he "had a-been" there, and appealed to his mates in confirmation of his statement. 66 Then," ," said the butler, "it was your ghost, and you'll be dead before nightfall." And so it came about; the wall of the building caved in, and Jim Suckling was crushed to death beneath the ruins. "I told him so," said the butler, "for I seed his ghost in the garden." Off the main road, about one mile from the village, there stands, beside a rough cart-track, a lonely cottage, in which lived old Master French and his missus. For years the old couple had lived there, and at last, when unable to work any longer, they managed somehow to muddle along on their miserable pittance of parish pay. At least they had their liberty, and the old man, lame and half blind as he was, could yet amuse himself on his patch of garden, and shovel up the scrapings on the Bardfield road. In course of time the old man was taken ill, and on going to inquire how he was, I found that his missus had made up her mind that he would never recover, and was informing him of the fact in a vigorous fashion. "You're a-gewing, Master The old hedgerows, glorious in early French," said she, standing at the foot of the old bedstead, and shaking her bent finger. "You're a-gewing to yer long home, Master French; you'll niver get up off o' that 'ere bed, niver no more, Master French. For I've heerd tokens of yer end, and the clock hev a-stopped.' The poor old man took it all as a matter of course, only saying

But times have greatly changed. The old-world stories, in which our forefathers implicitly believed, will not stand the light of modern education. In spite of the epitaph on the walls of the village church, and the evidence of the seven fish-ponds, some perhaps will soon be found to doubt or deny the story of the squire's silence. The buried treasures at Sculpins and the secret subterranean passage will be laughed at as old wives' fables. There will be no more ghosts in the churchyard, and the mysterious hollow will be filled up. Everything is changed.

summer-time with honeysuckle and wild roses, have been stubbed up, and almost every tree has been cut down. Not a bank is left for the violets and the primroses and the lesser celandine. A dreary expanse of arable land, unbroken by even a solitary elm or hollybush, is a sight common enough now. The wide stretches of waste land,

JOHN VAUGHAN.

From All The Year Round. SKETCHES IN IVIZA.

IN the hotel of Palma, the capital of Majorca, they tried to dissuade me from visiting Iviza, the least of the three chief islands of the Balearics. But in fact, the very arguments they used for this purpose were against them in my opinion.

66

"Since I can remember, señor," said the innkeeper himself, no Englishman has taken the trouble. It is by no means the mode to go so much out of the way."

besides the country lanes, where in au- | The black oak furniture — chests carved tumn flocks of goldfinches might be with beautiful designs, and chairs, and seen feeding on the thistle-seed, are cabinets with many a secret drawermostly enclosed and cultivated; and once common in the farmhouses, has the birds are few in the district. The all gone to the hammer. Boards are woods are strictly preserved, and all nailed over the windows of the empty kinds of hawks and owls are indiscrim- cottages on the green. Poverty is inately destroyed. The kite, or puttock, stamped on the face of the village. as it was locally called, not uncommon Change and decay is everywhere apparin the middle of the century, is now ent. Only the church bells ring out unknown; and but rarely a buzzard is merrily from the Norman tower, and seen. Even sparrow-hawks and kes- the stream flows silently on. trels are becoming rare. Now and then an otter finds its way up the stream, but only to be hunted down and killed. A polecat has not been seen for years; and the last badger is dead. Some of the rarer wild flowers, too, are no longer to be found. Modern cultivation and scientific farming which demolishes the hedgerows and stubbs up the copses, and takes in every square yard of common land, is fatal to the flora as well as the fauna of a neighborhood. The beautiful fritillary once blossomed abundantly in a damp meadow near the trout stream; you can hardly find a leaf now. The rare martagon lily formerly flourished by the side of a green lane bordered by a thick, lofty hedge; the hedge has been levelled and the plant is gone. The oxlip-not a cross between the primrose and the cowslip, which somewhat resembles it. but the real oxlip, what Darwin once called the Bardfield oxlip, is still common in the neighborhood; and in one spinney, to which the nightingale returns every spring, it is the characteristic flower. Leopard'sbane, too, holds its own in a private plantation not far from the Tudor mansion; and in the Pightel the Virgin Mary thistle blows. Every summer the swifts shriek about the church tower, and the swallows build in the chimneys of the ancient almshouse. The cuckoo's voice will be heard in May, and the red-backed shrike will nest in the vicarage garden. The ring- Further, I had before me a collection doves will coo in the yew-trees, and a of Iviza ballads and elegies, in which pair of moor-hens may frequent the the prevalent note of amorous sadness pond. And yet everything seems was very attractive. It recalled the changed. The old families are gone. | poetry of Corsica and Sardinia on kinNew names fill the parish registers. dred themes. In all probability the

But I had a budget of literature about the islands, both from the fine clubhouse of Palma over the way and from the landlord's own collection; and from these writings it seemed to me that Iviza was just the place in which to get a glimpse of some primitive people. The respected writers called the islanders very hard names, and ascribed to them all the sins of the Decalogue. They were at the same time said to be extremely religious and criminal, and remarkably illiterate. In the rural districts of the island the proportion of those who can read and write was not three per cent. These various characteristics seemed to indicate an interesting people, and so I arranged to be off by the next steamer.

LIVE

The next morning at eight o'clock, Here is the beginning of one of these therefore, I set off by the steamer from strange, sombre songs of Iviza : Palma's bay. The sea was still and "How shall I sing, my brothers, if blue. Motionless, also, were the many my heart is heavy ?