The church was truly interesting, though I fear we were hardly in the mood to properly appreciate it. The rector pointed out to us in the east window some old stained glass that had been reset in fragments there, which he declared to be the finest old stained glass in Lincolnshire; then he led us to the south porch, where he pointed out to us the quaint and beautiful external carvings round the Early English south doorway, which we observed was curiously trefoiled and decorated with dog-tooth mouldings. It is a specimen of carving that any church might be proud to possess; here, little seen and possibly never admired except by chance comers like ourselves, it is wasting its beauty in the wilderness, for the doorway is simply the entrance to the graveyard and appears not to be much, if at all used, the congregation entering the church by the north porch. On the north wall we observed a fine, not to say ostentatious, altar-tomb to Sir John Read and his lady dated 1626. This takes up, profitably or unprofitably, a good deal of room. Below on a verse we read the following tribute to the underlying dead:—
Whom love did linke and nought but death did dessever,
Well may they be conioind and ly together,
Like turtle doves they livd Chaste pure in mind,
Fewe, O, too few such couples we shall find.
You have to get used to the archaic spelling of some of these old tombstone inscriptions, but this one is comparatively clear. Our ancestors evidently did not set much score on spelling, for on a stately
