but nominally, ye know, I was in command. They claim to hold my signature for everything the military did; yes, even for what ye know”—a meaning nod, the jolly cheeks shook, the eyes were urgent-"Yes, Stuart lays it to me-think, to me! He has put it about that my gout was a blind. 'Who stuck the Pigot? is the cant word of my British regiments: the little rascal drums shout it after my palki. I dread going abroad. They chalk it on my compound gates. Look! 'Tis damnable! Conceive, being charged with a crime ye never so much as contemplated, and hate the thought of! And meanwhile, this twelvemonth they have kept me upon the sick-list. Stuart acts: I have not power to post a sentry."

"General, I commiserate you-but-" "Well ye may, my boy, for I doubt I am the next to go. Say the cry grows hot, and the Court of Proprietors wants a victim, here I lie, handy and helpless, a temple sacrifice, a goat to be pushed to the mugger! Whilst if I protest publicly, appeal to the Court, say-as he did-egad, there's other garden-houses, and 'twill soon be 'Who killed Cock Robin?' Ha! ha!"

The speaker was in pain, was in danger, was suffering the extreme of anxiety, yet he laughed. There are men who would laugh upon the ladder with the noose around the neck. Robert Fletcher was of the breed.

Justin, though outwardly calm, was painfully embarrassed. This was not

one of the valedictory visits which he had contemplated. Fletcher's familiarities, his appeals to a friendship which had never subsisted, and to good offices which had not been rendered, left his former subordinate watchful and cold. Yet the distress of the one and the fine nature of the other were tending to an understanding when the haste of the suppliant spoilt all. It came at last suddenly, for the man was desperate and could trust no go-between.

"Well, I shall be thinking of ye, shall be infinitely obliged to ye, too. I dare not detain ye longer, my boy. There's my case. I place my good name in your hands. You will be pleased to use it at your discretion"

"Sir Robin, I? No, sir!" returned Justin with surprise and stiffly, putting his hands behind him.

"In my service, of course, but at your unfettered—”

"Again no, sir," more stiffly. "I decline to act for ye; I will accept no commission: I can entertain nothing of the kind."

"But, my dear Major-____"

"Sir Robin, I must be gone; I am waited for. I have the honor to wish -I beg you to release my sleeve. Sir, respect yourself. Our people are watching us." The men drew apart; a packet small and hard fell and lay in the highway dust. Justin remounted with dignified speed; the other, with working lips and hot eyes, watched him go.

book," he is not yet altogether to be despised. He provides a practically inexhaustible supply of somewhat indifferent shaving papers.

These are but a by-product of Bradshaw, for, it is needless to say, his pages are full of interest and information. One point, a small one, happened to strike the writer as he glanced at them hastily in the moments of use, and that was the oddness and inappropriateness of many of the station names. Stoat's Nest, for instance! How absurd to take a ticket to Stoat's Nest! How absurd for Stoat's Nest to be provided with a platform and a waitingroom and a parcels office! And Mumby Road; how depressing! With what a sinking of the heart would one receive the intimation that one was to be interned at Mumby Road! I have no doubt that the Mumby Roadsters are everything that is charming, that they are polished, intelligent, amiable. But that the name of their place of residence does anything to enhance their gaiety I am prepared to deny. Quaker's Yard, again. There is no harm in the name. As the title of a novel, somewhat quaint and drab-colored, it might pass; but I submit that it is no name for a station. Not that the queer names of stations which I have in my mind are always unattractive. some moods the idea of booking for Desert would be most refreshing. And to the right person at the right time (to use the Aristotelian formula) there might conceivably be no dearer goal than Clara or Mary Tavy or Kitty Brewster, and if, in the nature of things, these are matters of individual or temporary preference, Legacy (G.W.R.) as the object of a trip might not unreasonably be expected to prove universally popular. To reach it you have but to study the index to Bradshaw, and pay your fare.

In

Of course you would find the aspect of the places ludicrously different from

that which their names suggest. And here we touch on the speculative element which makes the study of names in a map so fascinating an occupation to the imaginative. I wonder how many people nowadays read a book called "A Cruise upon Wheels," by Charles Collins, and of these how many recall the passage where Messrs. Fudge and Pinchbold (the originals of whom were, I believe, the writer and his wife) first conceived the idea of their momentous drive from St. Omer to Geneva. "I delight in a map," said Mr. Pinchbold, eagerly opening the one in question and spreading it out upon the floor. "I like to pick out all sorts of strange lonely-looking places and imagine what they are like. Look here," he continued, sprawling over the map, and pointing at a spot on it with his pencil, "Ancy le Franc; fancy the dulness of Ancy le Franc! Tonnerre again-the French for thunder-what an awful place that must be!

Assuredly the place-names of France afford a fascinating field for such speculations as those of the adventurous friends. With their record of saint and noble, castle, rock and river, they fill the ear perhaps more resoundingly than ours. And yet I think that for variety, quaintness, suggestiveness, and charm our English names, and especially the names of our country villages, challenge comparison with those of any in the world.

Matthew Arnold, fresh from a tour in the United States, declared that he could not endure to live in a country where towns were called by such names as Briggsville and Jacksonville, and certainly the names of our hamlets have an air of reality and sincerity which gives one more feeling of repose than the eclectic nomenclature of newer lands. Take some of the commonest of them, say, Norton, Sutton, Easton and Weston. They are unpretending names; but there is nothing

artificial about them. And they may even be instructive. They indicate settlements North, South, East or West of something-if one only knew what. But let them be decorated, as so many of them are, with the name of some family which once held the manor, and the gain is often considerable. Sutton Valence and Sutton Courtney, Norton Mandeville and Easton Maudit are names of significance and distinction. Not that the addition of the name of a manorial family is always an improvement. You shall find in Oxfordshire Broughton and Broughton Poggs. Few would deny that Broughton plain is the more dignified name of the two. Less pleasing to the ear than the name of Lydiard Millicent is that of her sister village Lydiard Tregooze. And it may be conceded that our Cambridgeshire Bumpsteads add but little melody to the appellatives-be they Helion or Steeple -to which they are appended. But in very many cases the combination is eminently satisfactory. Some of them could hardly be bettered by the invention of poet or novelist. Lydiard Millicent just mentioned, is an idyll in itself, and Compton Winyates a romance.

Graphic are the additions which indicate some local characteristic. Such are Stanford-in-the-Vale, Moreton-in-theMarsh, Horsey-next-the-Sea, Bourton-onthe-Water (Venice of English villages, it is indeed fitly named), and best of all Stow-on-the-Wold. Expressive of an ancient habitation on breezy uplands, the name is, I am told, the special admiration of American tourists. Some of these sobriquets give one a hint as to the part of England in which the villages to which they are attached are to be found. For instance, only in those counties where ranges of hills are called "edges" and deserve the name can the many "under-edges" be placed. But the name Wansford-in-England is not descriptive, and as an indication of its locality the addition is a little un

informing. In point of fact the Wansford so known is in Northamptonshire, and of the affix the following explanation is given. It is said that at some period not specified Nene overflowed his bounds, and sweeping all before him bore down among other objects a certain dweller on his banks (a native, let us suppose, of Nassington Cotterstock), he, good man, being in his bed at the time and indeed fast asleep. When day dawned and he woke to find himself in unfamiliar surroundings, he inquired in dismay where he might be. On receiving the answer, "Wansford," he ejaculated in surprise, "What! Wansford in England?" and Wansfordin-England the village is called to this day. But this story will perhaps not carry conviction even to those unfamiliar with the precise nature of an ætiological legend.

While there are a number of village names like those already mentioned having reference to the points of the compass which are scattered broadcast over the face of England, while Woottons or Woodtowns abound wherever trees are plenty, Eatons wherever rivers fretting their banks have enclosed islands, Langleys wherever long meadows may have been a feature of the place, and Kingstons in the many localities which may have had special relations with one or other of our defunct sovereigns, yet it remains true that there is a certain character which distinguishes the place-names of different counties.

Let us start from Cambridge (as the writer must needs start to get anywhere) northwards. With what a chill and fenny sound are we greeted by such names as Mepal and Manea and Guyhirne, though this note becomes still clearer if leaving the roadway we strike on Chittering Fen or the Lower Delphs, on Morton's Leam or Vermuyden's Dyke. But pass the Lincolnshire border, cross the track by which the

Danes spread fanwise over middle England, and the names have a different ring. A quarter of the Lincolnshire village names end in "by," the note of a Danish settlement. Wragby and Scawby by their very sound suggest the tough uncompromising freebooter from overseas, and Thoresby and Grimsby, Aswarby, Aslackby and Algarkirk seem dimly reminiscent of Norse mythology.

Yorkshire names againwitness Northallerton and Bedale, Selby and Thirsk-carry with them a suggestion of bleakness and virility.

For some reason or other there seems to be a larger proportion of quaint and surprising names in Herefordshire than in any other English county. In no other county could you find so queer a collection as Moccas and Marcle, Madly and Mathon, Stretton Sugwas and Dindor, Clehonger, Ocle Pitchard and King's Pyon. Perhaps the oddness of some of these names is accounted for by the proximity of Wales and in fact many of the Herefordshire village names, for instance Llancillo, Llaninabo, and Ganarew are frankly Welsh. In both respects both in the eccentricity of some of them and in the Celtic character of others, the neighboring county of Salop with its Church Pulverbath and its Caradoc Hills resembles Herefordshire. Into that jungle of consonants in which any consideration of Welsh place-names would involve the imaginary traveller, I do not enter; but I have often wondered if it is due to the despair of some Saxon about getting his tongue round the Celtic "y's" and "w's" that among the "Llans" of Brecon and Cardigan we find the exotic names Patricia and Strata Florida. Names of similar character are Aspatria in Cumberland (Glaramara in the same county belongs perhaps to a different class), and, more obviously due to the study of the "Classical Dictionary," Etruria in the Potteries of Staffordshire.

Of counties further inland Warwickshire, Brummagem notwithstanding, is a fair and pastoral district, and its quiet villages are not unfitly named. Waves Wootton, otherwise called Wootton Wawen, seems as archaic to the ear as an Anglo-Saxon attitude to the eye, and Henley-in-Arden is redolent of Shakespeare and gracious Shakespearian heroines. Typically English, too, is Berkshire, home of Alfred the Great, and Tom Brown, and the most engaging variety of British pig, and homely and English its local names, from Bracknell and Sandhurst, telling of their situation on the dry ferny outskirts of Windsor Forest, to Charney and Hanney and Goosey in the valley of the Ock, which I take to be the places which a recent writer of a charming local study has with pleasant mystery half disguised under the title "Islands of the Vale," or northwards yet to "the two Hinkseys," beloved of Arnold, and those Thameside Cots Buscot and Radcote, and Kelmscott, fit home this last for the writer of "The Earthly Paradise."

Somerset has a characteristic group of names in those of the villages of our West Country Fenland, the marshes of the Parret. What reader of Macaulay's account of Sedgemoor but has had his attention arrested by the names of Chedzoy and Middlezoy and Western Zoyland? How rustical again are Wookey and Shepton Mallet, and, to leave villages for a moment, what a charm lives in the name of Glastonbury, and yet more the Isle of Avalon? Apple island is what it means, no more. Yet about it there clings such a golden halo of mystery and romance that it is with something of a shock that one discovers it in the same county map with Clifton and Weston-super-Mare. No further west must we be tempted though called by the land of Tor and Combe; as for the Cornish names, they are, like those of Wales, a thing apart,