Besides being a good cook our farmer's wife was skilled in the making of sundry jams, jellies, ginger-beer, and elderberry wine; of the last she was very proud, and mulled some for us to bring out its full flavour--I did not sample it a second time: such wine maketh the heart sad. One of her concoctions, however, commended itself to me, namely, a home-made kind of liquor that was fresh and pleasant to my palate which she called, curiously enough, "Job's Comforter." Who would have expected such a thing in a remote farmhouse? This is the recipe for the making of it as given to me: "Get a wide-mouthed stone jar and put in it as many good lemons as you can; stick as many cloves as possible into the skin of the lemons, pressing them well in, then place the prepared lemons in the jar and fill up with unsweetened gin; let the lemons remain in the gin for two or three days, after this strain the liquid off, add honey and a little sugar-candy to sweeten according to taste and to give a smoothness to the liquor, then bottle it." I give the recipe exactly as given to me. I had some trouble to obtain it, and should prefer more precise details as to quantities, but these old housewives are jealous of giving their recipes away. I took a bottle of this "Job's Comforter" home with me and friends of mine pronounced it excellent--"as good as Chartreuse" they declared, but perhaps this estimate was owing to the novelty of the thing. Still, it was undoubtedly good. Resuming our journey we followed the lonely lane for a long way without arriving anywhere, but "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive," and we were in no hurry. Still, the longest lane has ending, and ours ended at a wide, open, elevated space marked Pit Down on the map; this spot, I afterwards discovered, earned its title from the fact that there in pits were hastily buried the victims of the plague that once devastated the villages around, and in one of these villages, Fletching by name, we shortly afterwards found ourselves. A pretty village it proved to be of the picture-book sort, as clean and neat as though it were a Kate Greenaway's drawing materialised. The ancient church stands in precisely the right spot, around which are grouped, as an artist might group them, the many gabled houses of the village; the one thing wanting to perfect the picture was the village green, but "fortune seldom comes with both hands full." Fletching lies well out of the beaten track and is only to be reached by winding lanes, so that I should imagine a motorist is seldom seen there, unless he has fortunately lost his way to the finding of the village. Even then some motorists might not realise their good fortune.