Stratford-upon-Avon, August 27, 1889.--Among the many charming rambles that may be enjoyed in the vicinity of Stratford, the ramble to Wootton-Wawen and Henley-in-Arden is not least delightful. Both those places are on the Birmingham road; the former six miles, the latter eight miles, from Stratford. When you stand upon the bridge at Wootton you are only one hundred miles from London, but you might be in a wilderness a thousand miles from any city, for in all the slumberous scene around you there is no hint of anything but solitude and peace. Close by a cataract tumbles over the rocks and fills the air with music. Not far distant rises the stately front of Wootton Hall, an old manor-house, surrounded with green lawns and bowered by majestic elms, which has always been a Roman Catholic abode, and which is never leased to any but Roman Catholic tenants. A cosy, gabled house, standing among trees and shrubs a little way from the roadside, is the residence of the priest of this hamlet,--an antiquarian and a scholar, of ample acquirements and fine talent. Across the meadows, in one direction, peers forth a fine specimen of the timbered cottage of ancient times,--the black beams conspicuous upon a white surface of plaster. Among the trees, in another direction, appears the great gray tower of Wootton-Wawen church, a venerable pile and one in which, by means of the varying orders of its architecture, you may, perhaps, trace the whole ecclesiastical history of England. The approach to that church is through a green lane and a wicket-gate, and when you come near to it you find that it is surrounded with many graves, some marked and some unmarked, on all of which the long grass waves in rank luxuriance and whispers softly in the summer breeze. The place seems deserted. Not a human creature is anywhere visible, and the only sound that breaks the stillness of this August afternoon is the cawing of a few rooks in the lofty tops of the neighbouring elms. The actual life of all places, when you come to know it well, proves to be, for the most part, conventional, commonplace, and petty. Human beings, with here and there an exception, are dull and tedious, each resembling the other, and each needlessly laborious to increase that resemblance. In this respect all parts of the world are alike,--and therefore the happiest traveller is he who keeps mostly alone, and uses his eyes, and communes with his own thoughts. The actual life of Wootton is, doubtless, much like that of other hamlets,--a "noiseless tenor" of church squabbles, village gossip, and discontented grumbling, diversified with feeding and drinking, lawn tennis, matrimony, birth, and death. But as I looked around upon this group of nestling cottages, these broad meadows, green and cool in the shadow of the densely mantled trees, and this ancient church, gray and faded with antiquity, slowly crumbling to pieces amid the fresh and everlasting vitality of nature, I felt that