Shropshire and the surrounding counties during the past century had, as we all know, many old English gentlemen with large estates, who kept up their brave old houses at pretty liberal rates; but few probably exercised the virtue of hospitality more, or came nearer to the true type of the country gentleman of the period than the hearty old Willey Squire. Differ as we may in our views of the chase, we must admit that such amusements served to relieve the monotony of country life, and to make time pass pleasantly, which but for horses and hounds, and the opportunities they afforded of intercourse with neighbours, must have hung heavily on a country gentleman’s hands a hundred years ago. It is, moreover, it appears to me, to this love of sport, in one form or another, that we of this generation are indebted for those grand old woods which now delight the eye, and which it would have been a calamity to have lost. The green fertility of fields answering with laughing plenty to human industry is truly pleasing; but now that blue-bells, and violets, foxgloves and primroses are being driven from the hedgerows, and these themselves are fast disappearing before the advances of agricultural science, it is gratifying to think that there are wastes and wilds where weeds may still resort—where the perfumes of flowers, the songs of birds, and the music of the breeze may be enjoyed. That the love of nature which the out-door exercises of our ancestors did so much to foster and perpetuate still survives is evident. How often, for instance, among dwellers in towns does the weary spirit pant for the fields, that it may wing its flight with the lark through the gushing sunshine, and join in the melody that goes pealing through the fretted cathedral of the woods, whilst caged by the demands of the hour, or kept prisoner by the shop, the counter, or the machine? Spring, with its regenerating influences, may wake the clods of the valley into life, may wreathe the black twigs with their garb of green and white, and give to the trees their livery; but men who should read the lessons they teach know nothing of the rejoicings that gladden the glades and make merry the woods. Nevertheless, proof positive that the love of nature—scourged, crushed, and overlaid, it may be, with anxious cares for existence—never dies out may be found in customs still lingering among us. In the blackest iron districts, where the surface is one great ink-blotch, where clouds of dust and columns of smoke obscure the day, where scoria heaps, smouldering fires, and never-ceasing flames give a scorched aspect to the scene, the quickening influences that renew creation are felt, teaching men—ignorant as Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell”—to take part in the festival of the year. When the sap has risen in the tree when the south wind stirs the young leaves, and the mechanism of the woods is in motion, when the blackbird has taken his place in the bush, and the thrush has perched