Nowhere has the spirit of place been more insistent and persistent. Surely no county has more melodious names than Gloucestershire. They chime in the ears of those that love them like a peal of old mellow bells. No ugly place could ever be called Colne St. Aldwyns or Fretherne or Minsterworth, and there is something in the very sound of Bibury, Pinbury and Sapperton, Rendcombe and Miserden, that carries with it a sense of wide grass glades and great old trees gathered together in sun-flecked woods that, in May, are carpeted with bluebells and, in October, are glorious in the vivid reds and yellows of the turning beeches. What pleasaunces to dream in when you are amongst them! What faerielands to dream of when you are far away! Listen to the names. Say them over softly—Maisemore, Hartpury, Lassington: these are in the vale. Don’t you hear how homesick we are who whisper them lovingly where there are none to recognise them? And the King of the Cotswolds is Cissister (the railway may call it Cirencester if it likes, but that is how the natives know it)—Cissister of the wide market-place and narrow irregular streets, with the wise-looking old gabled houses that have smiled down upon so many generations of sturdy Cotswold folk. Grey are the Cotswold houses, stone-roofed and steeply gabled, welcoming, friendly, venerable; and surely there is something very delightful in the thought that just now young America looks down (from a considerable height too) on those same stone roofs and gables. For young America is flying (literally, not figuratively) all over the Cotswolds. One wonders what the Church and the Abbey and the House think when the light-hearted airmen almost shave their roofs. The mention of young America brings me to what so entirely occupies all our thoughts just now, that there might seem something almost impertinently irrelevant in daring to write of anything else. But just inasmuch, as the old, easy-going, comfortable England has been in the melting-pot for nearly four years, and because the new, nobler, more strenuous England will change most things, it has seemed to me that it might not be amiss to collect these little sketches of some dear Cotswold folk, old and young, of what will soon seem an almost forgotten time. Much has been written, and admirably written, of the Cotswolds themselves; but not much to my knowledge—except in the ever-delightful "Cotswold Village," by Arthur Gibbs—about the people. Most of the people in this book belong to those old easy times of over twenty years ago. Only one of the stories deals with anything approaching "present day," and it is nearly four years old. One story—I may as well confess it here—has nothing to do with the Cotswolds; but Teddy in "A Soldier’s Button" was Paul’s cousin—and a dear, and the Cotswold country is the most hospitable country in the world, so we let him in. Mrs. Birkin, Mrs. Cushion, Williams, and Dorcas Heaven are of the soil, and so are the children.