—Stonehenge. I was one night at Fordingbridge and paid a visit to a farmer I know in that neighbourhood, and then came up into this lonely place. When I enquired for a place to stay in people stared at me and smiled at so preposterous a request. But looking about I found a Carter and his wife who took me in. The carter's wages is 12/—a week so you wouldn't think it a very luxurious lodging but you would be mistaken. His "cottage" is an ancient farm-house—timbered and thatched with large rambling rooms, brick floors, big fireplaces, the biggest room, the one I am in, with a wooden ceiling. Besides the old house they have a big old barn, 20 old apple trees, and 6 acres of meadow-land. They keep pigs and 50 or 60 fowls, and the house is beautifully clean inside, linen like snow, and the woman an excellent cook. The reason of it all is that she was in service several years in a great house when being pretty quick and willing to learn she found out how to do things and keep her place nice. Rents here are almost nominal and the landlord who owns the village is very generous. The book-case is over my head, where I am sitting by a big wood fire: It has two very small shelves, and the following works are all it contains: Pilgrim's Progress: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Miss Edgeworth's "Helen," East Lynne, The Wide Wide World—which I read once and that was enough—Science for Boys and Girls (edited by Kingsley), Our Village, Waterton's Wanderings and Marianne North's "Recollections of a Happy Life"—a curious work to find in such a place! Altogether a wonderful little collection of "Best Books"—far better than Lubbock's I imagine.
And now I am on books—did you see last week's Academy, and did you read the review of Traherne's poems which Dobell has unearthed and published? And if you did do you agree with the reviewer? I read it at Salisbury and sent it on to Mrs. Hubbard and this is what she writes to me:—"thanks for the Academy, which I have been reading with more interest than agreement. . . . In bracketing Vaughan with Herbert I should put H. decidedly first. As far as the idea of childhood goes with the three, though Vaughan may get nearer the heart of it than Herbert, yet with both the main point is to use childhood as a luminous background for the black derelictions of after life. Whereas Traherne takes the glory of it, as Blake does, on its own account, with no ulterior motives. He does not utilize it, but triumphs in it. Andrew Marvell had some-
