Kelmscott and Eaton Hast Kelmscott and Eaton Hastings are a little further down. From ings, Rossetti the autumn of 1872 till the summer of 1874, the poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris, cele brants KELMSCOTT MANOR of the beautiful, lived in the delightful old manor house of Kelmscott, in a flowered garden which must have been an unbounded joy to these æsthetic souls. Morris lies in the village church-yard, whither he was borne in a rude harvest-waggon hung with the soughing willow and the rustling vine. Rossetti's grave is beside the sea, at Birchington, in Kent, "rumor'd in water, while the fame of it along Time's flood goes echoing evermore." Beyond Kelmscott and Eaton Hastings stands the venerable old stone bridge of Rad MEETING PLACE OF ALFRED'S PARLIAMENT, ANCIENT SIFORD (NOW SHIFFORD) cot, one of the genuine antiquities of the Thames. From the bridge can be seen Faringdon Hill on the right, and on the left the spire of Bampton Church. Ten miles below is New Bridge, an ancient groined structure, and several weirs, when Shifford (ancient Siford) is reached, where King Alfred held one of his parliaments. The river Wind rush, rising in the Cotswold hills, near Guiting, mingles with the Thames below. Cumnor and On we wander through locks and weirs past Cumnor, in Berk shire, where Amy Robsart met her gruesome fate at the hands of the vil lains, Varney and Anthony Foster. Opposite, in Oxfordshire, is Stanton Harcourt. Each of these villages is situated about two miles from the river. Cumnor owes its fame to "Kenilworth," that romantic novel of the time of Elizabeth. Much of the scene of Scott's tale is laid in and about Cumnor. Of Cumnor House, nothing remains, and the haunted tower in which the Earl of Leicester's sweetheart was murdered is a thing of tradition only. The famed old hostel "Black Bear," where Tres CUMNOR CHURCH AND PLACE (THE MOUND MARKS THE SITE OF CUMNOR HALL) sillian and Varney are first portrayed by the master romancist, is, of course, represented by an inn bearing that name; but it strains the imagination to recognise it as the tavern which Scott described. Indeed the chief excuse for the existence of many inns in England is the tradition or history which attaches |