and heiress married a Dashwood in 1744—probably it was he who planted the Vale (he died in 1825)—and in 1838 the estate was purchased by Mr. Christopher Nisbet Hamilton, whose daughter, Mrs. Hamilton Ogilvy, has just sold it to Mr. Walter H. Rawnsley. [Sidenote: WELL VALE] The following lines were written on the gate at the top of Well Vale by a traveller taking his yearly tramp from Horncastle for a dip in the sea at Mablethorpe, a good twenty miles. Some say “All’s well that ends well,” But here Well begins well. They say too “Truth is in a well,” But here there is in truth a Well. Welcome then Well! since I well come along to her, For well I’ve known Well and the charms that belong to her Passing well to the view looks the Vale of fair Well, And I, passing Well too, must bid her farewell ’Till again I’m this way; or perhaps for aye. Farewell then (or ‘vale’) to fair Well Vale. Farewell! Fair Well! This is more than a mere assemblage of puns—there is some poetry in the old fellow, and the penultimate line has an added pathos from the fact that only a few months later the poet bid his final farewell to life, on November 10, in the same year, at the age of seventy-six. [Sidenote: THE STARLINGS] Speaking of Well Vale, I think I have seen and heard more starlings collected together in a young larch plantation there than I ever came across at once elsewhere. The only multitude of birds at all comparable to it was the army of cranes I have seen covering half a mile or more of sandbank in the Nile, near Komombos, while clouds of them kept dropping from the sky. They have black wings and white bodies, so that aloft they looked black, but standing on the sandbank as close as they could pack they looked all white.