Externally Tong church strikes the rare and happy note of individuality; however beautiful our country churches may be, those in the same county of the same period are but too apt to repeat familiar forms; there is no freshness about them to attract. Now Tong church is an original conception, original without being strange, and it possesses the excellent and pleasing merit of good proportion. Its central tower is octagonal, rising from a square base, with the four corners of its base tapering off to the octagonal above; the tower is crowned by a graceful steeple with spire lights, which spire lights "are perhaps nearly unique." The roof of the church has manifestly been purposely kept low, the better to reveal its embattled parapets and pinnacles. Thought is apparent everywhere in its design. It is a cathedral in miniature, and a beautiful miniature too. At the west end of the building stand the crumbling arches of its former college, and in the churchyard is a cross that marks the plot of ground set apart for the burial of unbaptized children, to me a fresh feature of a churchyard. The interior of the church, with its many truly magnificent altar-tombs, proved vastly more noteworthy and interesting than I expected; the clerk, too, was both interesting and well-informed, and evidently took a pride in the building. He did not go round conveying information in a parrot-like and irritating fashion as some clerks do, as though repeating guidebook-gathered information learnt by heart, and glad to get it done. The tombs are all exceedingly beautiful and well-preserved; they have happily survived the Puritan's rage and the church-wardens' era undamaged. The effigies on them of the noble lords and brave knights of old provide an object-lesson as to the wearing and to the details of ancient armour; those of their ladies reveal the elaborate dresses worn in days of yore, and the changing fashions of head-gear, all so faithfully rendered one could almost reconstruct the armour and renew the dresses from the sculptured stone. The oldest tomb (for they were all pointed out to me in due chronological order) is that of Sir Fulke de Pembruge (who is represented in chain armour of the period of the Crusades), with Dame Elizabeth his wife by his side; though the clerk said "some antiquaries who have examined the tomb have thrown a doubt as to whether the effigy of the lady is really that of the knight's wife, from the fact that the base of the tomb below her effigy has undergone alteration and is not quite in keeping with the other part. It has even been suggested that possibly the effigy may have been removed from elsewhere and placed there for convenience, in careless past days." In truth, to do such a monstrous thing would have needed very careless days indeed. Still, in times past stranger things were done in the name and under the cloak of church restoration. I learnt that Sir Fulke predeceased his wife some years, and I formed