Let us now pass over into Suffolk. It is worth asking how Suffolk came to earn the nickname of Silly Suffolk. ‘Silly,’ say the learned, is derived from the German _selig_, meaning ‘holy or blessed,’ and is said to have been applied to Suffolk on account of the number of beautiful churches it contains; Suffolk, at any rate, is silly no longer. In the present day it shows to advantage, if we may judge by the enterprise and public spirit of such a town as Ipswich, for instance. Not long since, as I landed on the docks at Hamburg, I had the pleasure of seeing some dozen or more steam ploughs and agricultural implements waiting to be transported into the interior. The ploughs and implements bore well-known Suffolk names, such as Garrett and Sons or Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, and were open manifestations of Suffolk skill and energy, and ability to hold its own against all comers. Amongst the women of the present generation, where are to be met the superiors of Mrs. Garrett Anderson or of Mrs. Fawcett, widow of the distinguished statesman, and mother of a sweet girl-graduate who has beaten all the men at her University? I was the other day at Haverhill, where Mr. D. Gurteen still lives to enjoy, at the ripe old age of eighty-three, the fruits of an energy on his part which has raised Haverhill from a village of paupers into a flourishing community, whose manufactures are to be met with all over the land. One day, as I was walking along Gray’s Inn Road, a fine, well-built man stopped me to ask me if I remembered him. When he mentioned his name I did directly. He was of the poorest of the poor in his home at Wrentham. He had done well in London. ‘You know, sir,’ he said, ‘how poor our family was. Well, I had enough of poverty, and I made up my mind to come to London and be either a man or a mouse.’ In the London of to-day the heads of some of our greatest establishments are Suffolk men. We all know the stately pile in Holborn, once Meekings’, now Wallis’s, where all the world and his wife go to buy. Mr. Wallis hails from Stowmarket, and the man who fits up London shops in the most tasty style, Mr. Sage, of Gray’s Inn Road, was a Suffolk carpenter, who, when out of work, with his last guinea got some cards printed, one of which got him a job, which ultimately led on to fame and fortune. No, Suffolk has long ceased to be silly. It must have deserved the title in the days which I can remember when a Conservative M.P., amidst enthusiastic cheering, at Ipswich, intimated that it was quite as well the sun and moon were placed high up in the heavens, else ‘Some reforming ass Would soon propose to pluck them down And light the world with gas.’