CHAPTER IV 



A Kentish Parish 



YV7HAT an infinite variety of pictures may be 

 suggested by a single word ! A parish may 

 lie anywhere between Cape Wrath and Beachy Head, 

 the Land's End and the lights of Cromer. It may be 

 wild moorland, and forty miles long, with a cottage 

 kirk a world too wide for a scattered congregation 

 of shepherds and keepers. It may be bleak corn- 

 land, painfully reclaimed from a shivering waste of 

 dreary peat-bogs, where the farm-steadings, though 

 substantial, are all built for use, and the nearest 

 approach to ornamental landscape-gardening is the 

 belt of firs or the clump of " bourtree " bushes. It 

 may embrace a smiling strath in the Lowlands, or a 

 range of rich green hills on the Border, watered by a 

 thousand streams and rills, and peopled in each lap of 

 the landscape by its bleating flocks. It may be over- 

 crowded with grimy colliers, who have honeycombed it 

 with their mines and defaced its natural beauties with 

 the smokes of their countless fires, It may be in the 

 soft green Midlands, where the broad stretches of 



