From Oakham I walked to Melton Mowbray, a cleanly, good-looking town in Leicestershire, situated on the little river Eye. One cannot say exactly in regard to Rutlandshire what an Englishman once said to the authorities of a pigmy Italian duchy, who ordered him to leave it in twenty-four hours. "I only require fifteen minutes," said cousin John, with a look and tone which Jonathan could not imitate. This rural county is to the shire-family of England what Rhode Island is to the American family of States--the smallest, but not least, in several happy characteristics. I spent a quiet Sabbath in Melton Mowbray; attended divine service in the old parish church and listened to two extemporaneous sermons full of simple and earnest teaching, and delivered in a conversational tone of voice. Here, too, the parish church was seated in the midst of the great congregation which had long ceased to listen to the call of its Sabbath bells. It was a beautiful and touching arrangement of the olden time to erect the House of Prayer in the centre of "God's Acre," that the shadow of its belfry and the Sabbath voice of its silvery bells might float for centuries over the family circles lying side by side in their long homes around the sanctuary. There was a good and tender thought in making up this sabbath society of the living and the dead; in planting the narrow pathway between the two Sions with the white milestones of generations that had travelled it in ages gone, leaving here and there words of faith, hope and admonition to those following in their footsteps. It is one of the contingencies of "higher civilization" that this social economy of the churchyard, that linked present and past generations in such touching and instructive companionship, has been suspended and annulled.