I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from towns and railroads, will have any literary associations for the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet" in the early part of the last century (although Crabbe was living then and was great, as he is becoming again after many years); while at Sapiston, the rustic village on the other side of the old stone bridge, he acquired that love of nature and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which came out later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little village in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a person of importance in his day, who discovered Bloomfield, found a publisher for his poems, and boomed it with amazing success. I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one of the immortals. I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging me not to put anything of this sort into print. He would warn me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield's verse was exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty editions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within three years of its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for half a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it alive to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now? Nothing! They smile and that's all. The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day. Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants to look at it now. Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless, I think I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker who has long fallen out; and though I may be unable to make a case out, the kindly critic may find some circumstance to extenuate my folly--to say, in the end, that this appears to be one of the little foolishnesses which might be forgiven.