272 A Walk from 



ceased to listen to the call of its sabbath bells. It was 

 a beautiful and touching arrangement of the olden 

 time to erect the House of Prayer in the centre of 

 " Grod's Acre," that the shadow of its belfry and the 

 sabbath voice of its silvery bells might float for 

 centuries over the family circles lying side by side in 

 their long homes around the sanctuary. There was a 

 good and tender thought in making up this sabbath 

 society of the living and the dead ; in planting the 

 narrow pathway between the two Sions with the white 

 milestones of generations that had travelled in it ages 

 gone, leaving here and there words of faith, hope and 

 admonition to those following in their footsteps. It 

 is one of the contingencies of " higher civilization " 

 that this social economy of the churchyard, that linked 

 present and past generations in such touching and 

 instructive companionship, has been suspended and 

 annulled. 



Melton Mowbray has also a very respectable indivi- 

 duality. It is a great centre for the scarlet-coated 

 Nimrods who scale hedges and ditches, in well-mounted 

 squadrons, after a fox preserved at great' expense and 

 care to become the victim of their valor. But this 

 is a small and frivolous distinction compared with 

 its celebrated manufacture of jjork-pics. It bids fair 

 to become as famous for them as Banbury is for buns. 



