A friend of my father’s writes to him from Moreton, 13 November 1843, “We are going to have a ringing match here tomorrow. There has been nothing else but this noise the last three or four days.” Blunt’s _Use and Abuse of the Church Bells_, 1846, gives a pretty picture of it all. “Toward the latter half of the last century the ringing of the church bells became a fashionable amusement among the yeomanry and gentry, and was degraded to the level on which the hurdle-race and steeple-chase now stand. This amusement, however, at any rate in most parts of the country, has long ago ‘become vulgar’ and ‘gone out of fashion’; till at last our belfries are left in a state of filthy dilapidation, receptacles for dirt and rubbish of all kinds, and very frequently the drinking-place of the most profane and profligate persons of the parish, who ring the bells for their amusement,” and so on. My grandfather writes on 23 March 1861, “Mr ***** put some eggs under the jackdaws in the tower in hopes they would build in the town place, which they no doubt will some day.” It was the church tower, where the bells are hung; and Mr ***** was a churchwarden. The eggs, of course, were rooks’ eggs: he desired a rookery in the elms outside. He writes on 26 December 1847, “The church singers by their inveteracy have rather disturbed the neighbourhood both Friday night and last night. [They used to bring the church bass-viol and violin and flute.] I order them not to come near, but unfortunately I am surrounded by a road, and they will pass near me: which my dogs notice.” The dogs here were formidable. He writes, 10 May 1846, “I must get rid of Bess. She sat on a man to-day in the road.... If you strike Ben, you make him savage--I do not dare to repeat a blow to him--though such a good tempered old fellow.” There was always a Ben here, and this Ben was born in 1839 and died in 1852. My grandfather writes, 3 March, “Poor old Ben died on Monday, and was buried in the garden, just below where Fanny was buried. [Fanny, another old dog, died just before.] He lay down there on Saturday--I never before saw him lie there: one would almost think he found he was dying, and chose his place of burial.” There are plenty of vipers hereabouts, but I never thought much of them until one killed my dog, 8 April 1920. She was a small sheep-dog, Rose by name, and she was out for a walk with me and was rummaging about in a hedge; and there the viper got her in the pad, between the second and third toes of the left fore-paw. These hedges harbour snakes. My grandfather writes to my father, 2 May 1852, “A fine sunny morning, and we went out for a walk to see if we could find any snakes in our hedges, for now is the time to see them, before the hedges get covered.”