There before us, a little down a narrow road, stood the ancient church with its tall shingle steeple, curiously slight. I strolled up to the silent fane of Sunday devotion for the sake of a walk and to get a better glimpse of the old-fashioned cottages on the way, each with its little garden gay with flowers. Then I glanced inside the church. I had not been there more than a minute or two before the clerk made his appearance, somewhat out of breath in his haste to discover me before I departed. "I saw as how you were a stranger," said he, "and thought perhaps you would like me to show you over the church." So are strangers' movements noted in quiet places. In many an out-of-the-world village the coming of a stranger arouses an astonishing amount of interest; his coming, his movements, his business, his going, are subjects of discussion and watching. How uneventful and unexciting must the lives of the sleepy villagers be that so small a matter should claim their special attention; little wonder that the younger generation among them seeks the town as a relief from the dull monotony of its existence. How to make village life attractive is the problem, and a pretty stiff problem too. Village halls and reading-rooms do not solve it--the average villager scorns them; he, or she, much prefers to idle out-of-doors doing nothing, contentedly or discontentedly, varied by an occasional visit to the public-house. It is not an ideal existence. What the villager needs is a wider interest in life. "Back to the land" is a vain cry till country life is made less dull and more desirable; but if the country in the winter-time is dull to some, is not the town also dreary to others with its yellow fogs and muddy streets? I am writing of the poor man who throngs the town where labour is over-supplied and leaves the country where it is required. So the shires are deserted and the slums crowded. I am no politician, I detest politics as I do the devil--if they are not one and the same thing--but from what I have seen and heard, from the many talks I have had with the countryman lowest down in the social scale, I do feel that only the pride of possession of his freehold cottage with a little garden attached, or some small holding, will ever attract him back from the town to the land. A garden to tend keeps a man's idle hours pleasantly employed, and keeps him too away from the public-house. In the same way I still more strongly feel that the loss of the sturdy yeoman farmer, tilling his own little freehold, on which son succeeded father in the good old days, is a disaster to the country. To do "yeoman's service" had a pregnant meaning once; now it has none, for the yeoman has gone, gone to other lands to forward their prosperity. He was foremost in the fight on many a hard-fought field: he it was who helped to turn the scale at Crecy and Agincourt, and his reward has been to be improved (!) out of existence.