only cure for the worst malady of the times. Even as 

 you enter the village pale the restlessness of the towns 

 drops from you &quot; like the needles shaken from out the 

 gusty pine &quot;; and to many of us who were born and 

 bred in the deep, deep country, it is to this hospitality of 

 the village that all should go whensoever we wish to 

 &quot; reap the harvest of a quiet eye &quot; ; and is any harvest 

 better worth while ? 



It is an English parable that many of the loveliest 

 villages have grown up in the least lovely places and 

 counties, such as Essex and Huntingdon. The head 

 quarters of the art of village building are the Cotswold 

 hills of Gloucester, Worcester and Oxford ; and though 

 no countryman could call the Wolds ugly, many towns* 

 men have no doubt at all that they are grim, dull and 

 even repellent. They are at any rate, as we shall all 

 agree, as stark as their villages are homely. It can 

 scarcely be disputed that the most perfect village in the 

 world architecturally, though not in all other qualities, 

 is Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds ; and the chief 

 reason lies in the selection of native material for the 

 expression of native art. That street feels like the vista 

 of an old wood. It grew from native seed and its stone 

 roofs have roots in the ground. In Burfbrd some build 

 ings are medieval, some Tudor, some Jacobean, some 

 Georgian. They agree together nevertheless and are as 

 flawlessly sequent as to-day and to-morrow; and the 

 generous village sent stone from its quarry to flower in 

 more ambitious splendour by the Isis in Oxford, Even 

 the Reformation failed to break the continuity either of 

 the visible or of the hidden life. The bells from the 

 church tower vibrate in tune with the bells of the Down 

 sheep, and the shepherd is in church while he watches his 

 Down sheep under the roof of stars. Surely the people 



