Mowbray in Leicestershire, known as the "hunting metropolis." Three packs of hounds are hunted regularly during the season within easy distance of the town, which has also annual steeplechases and a hunting club; and this sporting element serves to redeem Leamington from the character of masked melancholy which often strikes a tourist in visiting a regular health-resort. In natural beauty Warwickshire is surpassed by other counties, but few can boast of architectural features equally striking--such magnificent historical memorials as Kenilworth and Warwick castles, and the humbler beauties to be found in the houses of Stratford-on-Avon, Polesworth and Meriden. The last is remarkable--as are, indeed, all the villages of Warwickshire--for its picturesque beauty, and above all for the position of its churchyard, whence lovely views are obtained of the country around. Of Polesworth, Dugdale remarks, that, "for Antiquitie and venerable esteem it needs not to give Precedence to any in the Countie." "There is a charming impression of age and quiet dignity in its remains of old walls, its remains of old trees, its church and its open common," says Dean Howson. Close to the village, on a hill commanding a view of it, stands Pooley Hall, whose owner in old days obtained a license from Pope Urban VI. to build a chapel on his own land, "by Reason of the Floods at some time, especially in Winter, which hindered his Accesse to the Mother-Church." In the garden of this hall, a modest country-house, a type of the ordinary run of English homes, stands a chapel--not the original one, but built on its site--and from it one has a view of the level ground, the village and the river, evidently still liable to floods. The part of the county that joins Gloucestershire is rich in apple-orchards, which I remember one year in the blossoming-time, while the early grass, already green and wavy, fringed the foot of the trees, and by the road as we passed we looked through hedges and over low walls into gardens full of crocuses, snowdrops, narcissuses, early pansies and daffodils, for spring gardens have become rather a mania in England within ten or twelve years. Here and there older fragments of wall lined the road, and over one of these, from a height of eight feet or so, dropped a curtain of glossy, pointed leaves, making a background for the star-shaped yellow blossoms, nearly as large as passion-flowers, of the St. John's-wort, with their forest of stamens standing out like golden threads from the heart of the blossom. At the rectory of the village in question was a very clever man, an unusual specimen of a clergyman, a thorough man of the world and a born actor. His father and brother had been famous on the stage, and he himself struck one as having certainly missed his calling, though in his appearance and manner he was as free as possible from that discontented uneasiness with which an underbred person alone carries a burden. His