1885.], 
not discreditable to us, particularly when 
taking into consideration the bleats 
and baas and whimpering laggardness 
with which we returned from three- 
mile excursions during the first few 
days we were in the tramping-line. 
By degrees we thus explored the whole 
country within a radius of seven miles of 
Ethel. With this we were content, yea, 
even proud; for did not many of our 
boating women-neighbors grumble even 
at their walk to the river and declare 
they would rather row five miles than 
walk one? We were proud, for we 
knew every church, every picturesque 
cottage and ruin, within our radius, 
while our aquatic friends knew only 
those bordering the river. We were 
proud—until, ah me! until that desolate 
day when a merrily, merrily flying squad 
swooped down upon us and declared they 
had ‘cycled every inch of the twenty- 
mile periphery of which Ethel’s neigh- 
boring church tower was the centre ! 
That cutting down of our pedal pride 
resulted in our subscribing to a daily 
paper. Every morning before stretching 
out to our regular day’s tramp we had 
been wont to trot through dewy lanes, 
over stiles, and across subtly-colored 
turnip- and cabbage-fields, to purchase 
in the town of M a luxury not to 
be had in our own hamlet,—the “ Daily 
News.” Rain or shine, that trot must 
be trotted, for there were those among 
us who would have tramped sulkily all 
day and sniffed the sniff of wrath at 
ivied church and thatched cottage were 
the acid of their natures not made frothy 
and light by the alkali of their morning 
paper. It had never occurred to us, 
not even when we camped beneath way- 
side shade around our sandwiches and 
ale or in some stiff and dim inn-parlor 
and listened to the reading of the 
“ News,” that in reality the town of 
M , and’ not the brickhood of Ethel, 
was thus the centre of all our ambula- 
tory circumferences. It had never be- 
fore dawned upon us that we thus added 
three uncounted miles to our fourteen 
diurnally counted ones. What astonish- 
ment at our own pedometric weakness of 
calculation! What disgust to find our 
COOKHAM DEAN. 
557 
periphery thus three whole miles smaller 
than it need have been ! 
The next |day we \suhseribed to the 
‘“‘ News,” and walked nine miles as the 
bee flies from ‘the front door of Ethel 
even unto the ruins of Medmenham. 
And we vowed by all our plaster gods 
and painted goddesses that another sum- 
mer we would tramp no more. We 
would ’cyele. 
A mile away from Ethel is the vil- 
lage proper of Cookham. It is a sleepy 
town, save in the boating-season; and 
whoever enters the post-office in any 
season finds it empty and inhospitable. 
Raps upon a tightly-closed inner door 
call a woman attendant from rattling 
sewing or noisy gossip of the invisible 
penetralia ; and as soon as the business 
is done the inhospitable door swings 
shut again in the stranger’s face. 
Cookham houses are quaint, often 
timbered, frequently ivy- grown from 
basement to roof. One imagines them 
assuming a half-sullen air at this yearly 
breaking of their dreamy repose by in- 
cursions of parti-colored hordes for 
whom life seems to hold but two su- 
preme objects,—boats and pictures. 
The most picturesque feature of the 
place is the old church, set amid tombs 
whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs 
have exchanged grins for two hundred 
years and more. The old flint tower is 
graye and grim, but softened by a won- 
derful centuries old ivy in a veil of living 
green. - A pathetic interest to artists 
hallows. the venerable church - yard. 
Here sleeps Frederick Walker, a genius 
cut off before his meridian, and resting 
now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, 
over which the Thames waters surge 
every spring, leaving the grave all the 
rest of the year the sadder for its cold 
soddenness and for the humid mildew 
and decay eating ‘already into the head- 
stone, as yet but twelve years old. In 
the church itself is Thorneycroft’s mural 
tablet to the dead artist, a portrait head 
of him who was born almost within the 
old church’s shadow, and whose pencil 
dealt always so lovingly with the poetic 
aspects of his native region. 
MarGarer BertHa WRIGHT. 
