ENGLISH SCENERY the most lasting pleasure, rather is it the quiet beauty that lies in our rural everyday landscape that holds the sweetest remembrance. Grandeur may excite our admiration, call forth our most expressive adjectives, but it is the lovable that dwells nearest the heart, whose memory is the closest treasured in after years; and it is this very quality of lovableness that the English scenery flows over with that so charms and binds one's affections. English scenery does not challenge attention by any tour de force; it simply allures you by its sweet smile and home-like look. As Thackeray says, "The charming, friendly English landscape! Is there any in the world like it?. . . It looks so kind, it seems to shake hands with you as you pass through it."
About twelve miles from Huntingdon stands the little decayed town of Stilton—a famous place in the old coaching days, when the traffic here on the Great North Road is said never to have ceased for five minutes, day or night, the whole year round. But now Stilton has shrunk to little more than a large village. Thanks to the railway, its prosperity is a thing of the past, depending as it did almost wholly upon its inns, which in turn depended upon the road traffic. As we drove into the drowsy old town (I use the term in courtesy), that seems to have gone to sleep never to waken more, our eyes were delighted by the vision of a genuine, little-altered, medieval hostelry—of which very few remain in the land. It was a picture rather than a place—a dream of old-world architecture; and this is what we saw before us: a long, low, gabled building, with
