My excursion to Nuneham Courtenay proved but the preface to a much more important episode, in company with the same agreeable friend who was my guide on that occasion, and who now drew me into a change of plans and purposes, to which I owed much subsequent pleasure. We were at breakfast together, in the rooms of a common friend at Merton, when the scheme was perfected for a drive through Oxfordshire, in his private carriage, and for several subsequent excursions, of which the centre should be his residence, near Cheltenham. A friend, then keeping his terms for a Master’s degree, at New Inn Hall, gave us his company for a few hours, on the way; and a delightful companion he proved, not only for his essential qualities as such, but because he happened to have been a tourist in America, and was able to imagine, in some degree, how an American must regard the contrast continually furnished him by a tour in England. Our road first took us over a corner of Berkshire, through a pleasing variety of hills and vales, sighting Cumnor on the left, and passing Wytham on the other hand, and so again entering Oxfordshire, by a bridge over the Thames, which here makes a bend among the little mountains. Our first stage was complete when we arrived at Eynsham, where we drew up at the village inn, and contrived to pass an hour very pleasantly, although, from the appearance of the place, one would say, at first, it was fit only to sleep in. How quiet a village can be, even in populous and busy England, and so hard by Oxford! There stood the slender market-cross that had survived the storms of centuries, and the more violent batterings of Puritan iconoclasts. Broken and bruised as it was, it seemed good for centuries more, amid so peaceful a community as now surrounds its venerable tutelage. Whether the exemplary character of the present inhabitants be owing at all to the parish stocks, which stand near the cross, in most Hudibrastic grouping with surrounding objects, I cannot determine; but there they are, and I could fancy a stout brace of Puritans, of Butler’s sort, undergoing its salutary penance; or even one of Hogarth’s unlucky wights experiencing the rude sympathies of men and boys in the passiveness of its bondage. How speaking a picture of rigorous parochial justice those queer old stocks, under lee of the market-house, afforded to my imagination! How many vagrant feet and ankles have there been relieved from the curse of Cain! how many a vagabond they have furnished with persuasives to rest and meditation! Really—one could not be properly pensive, in sight of such a commentary on human guilt and misery: for the parish stocks are but of distant kin to gallows and guillotine, and hardly more than little brothers of whipping-post and pillory; their ignominy being rather that of ridicule than of scorn, and their severity being the very least of all the penalties of law. I did not know that such instruments of