huge country delivery for the stores and big shops in London: people write up to town one day and get their goods sent down to their houses the next." Then our commercial suddenly remembered he had business to attend to and took his leave, and we went out for a stroll.
A RESTORATION BACKWARDS Wandering about we observed the steps and base of the shaft of an ancient market cross by the roadside, for Swineshead was once a market town, also another relic of a past civilisation in the shape of the decayed stocks. Then we took a glance at the interior of the church and found a party of ladies therein busily employed in decorating it for the harvest festival; as we were leaving the vicar made his appearance and kindly volunteered to show us over the building. When he first came there, he informed us, he found the village school was held in a portion of the nave partitioned off for that purpose, and that the children used the graveyard as a playground when the weather was fine, and the interior of the church when it was wet, romping and shouting about, and indulging in the game of hide-and-seek amongst the pews! The pulpit then was of the old "three-decker" type, and the rest of the church furnishings in keeping therewith. This is all changed now, and the church has been restored backwards to something more resembling its primitive condition. Under the communion table we had pointed out to us the original altar-*slab with the five crosses thereon, which had been used to pave the church, a fact the vicar discovered in 1870, in this wise. Colonel Holingshead had
