At which sight the sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the company.

"Then he took farewell of his wife and children; his wife saying, 'God be with thee, dear Rowland; I will, with God's grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.'

"All the way, Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one going to a most pleasant banquet or bridal.

"The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides with men and women of the town and country who waited to see him; whom, when they beheld so led to death, with weeping eyes and lamentable voices they cried, Ah, good Lord! there goeth our good shepherd from us, that so faithfully hath taught us, so fatherly hath cared for us, and so godly hath governed us! Oh! merciful God, strengthen him, and comfort him.'

Arrived at the spot, "when he had prayed, he went to the stake and kissed it, and set himself into a pitch barrel which they had set for him to stand on, and so he stood with his back upright against the stake, with his hands folded together and his eyes towards heaven, and so let himself be burned."*

Map Questions.

1. What two rivers bound Suffolk on the north? In what direction does the Waveney flow? Name three towns on its banks. The town and cape at its mouth. The watering-place at the mouth of the Blythe. The village to the south of it.

2. What river forms part of the southern boundary? Name the estuary on which Ipswich stands.

3. Name three considerable towns in the west of Suffolk. What is the character of this county? Name the eastern counties of England.

* Fox's 'Book of Martyrs.'

BERKSHIRE.

I.

THE VALE OF WHITE HORSE.

"Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open have been aware, soon after leaving the Didcot Station, of a fine range of chalk hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line. The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham Station. The Great Western now runs right through it, and White Horse Vale is a land of large rich pastures, bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedge-row timber. The villages are straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down, without the least regularity, in nooks and outof-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden.

"I pity people who weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a vale: that is a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view if you choose to turn towards him, that is the essence of a vale.

"And then, what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right up above all the rest, 900 feet above the sea, and the boldest, bravest shape for a chalk

hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the top of him and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder and think it odd you never heard of this before; yes, it is a magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left it. The ground falls away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious.

"And now we leave the camp and descend towards the west, and are on the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen; more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great battle, the battle of Ashdown, which broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are standing-the whole crown of the hill in fact. 'The heathen had beforehand seized the higher ground,' as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma. 'The Christians led up their line from the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn tree, marvellous stumpy, around which, as I was saying, the two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in this place, one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same place.'

"After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might never be wanting a sign and a memorial

to the country-side, carved out on the northern side of the chalk hill, under the camp, where it is very steep, the great Saxon white horse, which he who will may see from the railway, and which gives its name to the vale over which it has looked these thousand years and

more.

It would take too long to describe, or to tell the stories belonging to half the places in the vale, which is shut in between two ranges of downs out of Wiltshire, the downs with White Horse Hill which run across the middle of the county, and another range which keeps within a mile or so of the Thames, on the north. There is Abingdon, with no sign left of its splendid abbey; and Wallingford, with only ruined walls to show where its famous castle stood; and Faringdon, which held out so stoutly for Charles I.; and Wantage, with its cherry fair, where the Great Alfred was born. Tales of old times belong to all four, and they are all, now, pleasant market-towns to which the good things grown in the vale are brought for sale.

II.

EAST BERKSHIRE.

It is not only White Horse Vale, watered by its little river Ock, but the whole county which is full of goodly farms and pretty villages. Broad pastures for the cattle, smooth hills for the sheep, green meadows and corn-fields and copses, are to be seen everywhere; for Berkshire lies within the fertile valley of the

*Tom Brown's School Days.'