however, to say that a thousand ancient cottages are now disappearing in England every twelvemonth, without trace or record left--many that Shakespeare might have seen, some Chaucer; while the number "done up" is beyond computation. The baronial halls have had abundant recognition and laudation at the hands of the historian and the painter; the numerous manor-houses, less pretentious, often more lovely, very little; the old cottages next to none, even the local chronicler running his spectacles over them without a pause. It really looks as if we were, one and all, constituted as a poet has seen us:-- For, don't you mark, we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted--better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that-- God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out. Had Mrs. Allingham done nothing else for her country, she has justified her career as a recorder of this altogether overlooked phase of English architecture--a phase which will soon be a thing of the past. I remember once being accosted by a bystander in Angers, as I was wrestling with the perspective of a beautiful old house, with the remark, "Ah, you had better hurry more than you are doing and finish the roof of that house, for it will be off to-morrow and the whole down in three days." That has often been the case with Mrs. Allingham. More than once a cottage limned one summer has disappeared before the drawing was exhibited the following spring. Year in and year out the process has been at work during the quarter of a century during which the artist has been garnering, and it has almost come to be a joke that were she to paint as long again as she has, she might have to cease from actual lack of material. * * * * * Our illustrations of cottages divide themselves into, first the examples in the immediate neighbourhood of Sandhills; and secondly, those farther afield in Kent, Buckingham, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, and Cheshire. Those near Sandhills form points in the circumference of a circle of which it is the centre, the most southern being Chiddingfold, where we start on our survey. [Illustration: 43. CHERRY-TREE COTTAGE, CHIDDINGFOLD _From the Water-colour in the possession of the Lord Chief Justice of England._ Painted 1885.] The old hamlet of Chiddingfold lies about as far to the south as Witley does to the north of the station on the London and South-Western Railway which bears their joint names. It boasts of a very ancient inn, "The Crown,"--formed, it is said, in part out of a monastic building,--and a large village green. Cherry-Tree Cottage is, as will be seen, the milk shop of the place, and, if we may judge from the coming and going in Mrs. Allingham's picture, carries on an animated, prosperous trade at certain times of the day.