114 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



American eyes, those leather breeches and bright top-boots. 

 Who was it ? Colonel Lord Grosvenor, going to review the 

 yeomanry. We shall see them the other side of the city. 

 His grandfather built this gate and presented it to the corpo 

 ration ; you may see his arms on the key-stone. But now 

 go on. 



On the left, you see an old church tower, and under it 

 the ragged outline and darker coloured stone of still older 

 masonry. A swallow has just found a cranny big enough 

 to build her nest in, that Father Time has been chiselling 

 at now for eight hundred years. Eight hundred ? Yes ; it 

 was rebuilt then. You can see some of the older, original 

 w^all at the other end no, not that round Saxon arch, but 

 beyond the trees a low wall with a heavy clothing of ivy. 

 The steamboat is just coming out from behind it now. In 

 the year 973, King Edgar landed at this church from a boat, 

 in which he had been rowed by eight kings, whom he had 

 conquered. An ugly, smoky old tub is that steamboat ; it 

 would hardly be thought fit for the conveyance of criminals 

 to prison in America. But doubtless it is a faster and 

 more commodious craft than King Edgar s eight-king power 

 packet. 



We cross another gateway, and pass a big mill. The 

 dam was built, I don t know when. The Puritans, they say, 

 tried to destroy it, for its bad name, perhaps, but could not, 

 because, like a duck, it kept under a high flood of water until 

 the Cavaliers, making a rush to save it, spiked their guns. 



Our path turns suddenly, and runs along the face of a 

 stone wall, supported by brackets high above the water of 

 the river, but some distance below the parapets parapets of 

 a castle. Soon we pass a red-coated sentry, and now you 

 see a tower that looks older than the rest. The battle-axes 

 of William the Conqueror once clanged where that fellow is 



