North Stoke is just the matter of a few farms and a rustic church, but South Stoke is a considerable village, lying between the river and the Great Western Railway on its way from Goring to Cholsey. It is, perhaps, a thought too much obsessed by the railway, for the embankment of it, not at all masked by trees, looks starkly down upon village street and church. Here, too, the church has been restored and rendered uninteresting, except for its old wrought-iron hour-glass stand. And so we come into Goring, and to its strangely-named inn, the “Miller of Mansfield”; its sign, painted by Marcus Stone, R.A., with a scene from the old legend, and a quotation from it; “Here,” quoth the Miller, “goode fellowe, I drink to thee.” The sign is strangely out of its geographical setting, for the neighbourhood of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, is a far cry from Goring. The legend tells how Henry the Second, lost while hunting in Sherwood Forest, sought shelter of the miller, who gave him half a bed with his son Richard, and fed him well on venison; “only,” said he, “you must not let the King know I poach it.” The King (always according to the legend) gave the miller a pension of a thousand marks yearly, for life. His name, it appears, was Job Cockle, and the King created him “Sir John,” and made him ranger of the forest; and perhaps, on the well-proved principle of “set a thief to catch a thief,” he served well to preserve the royal game. [Illustration: GORING CHURCH.] [Illustration: HOUR-GLASS STAND, SOUTH STOKE.] Goring (“Garinges” in Domesday), whose name means “the meadow on the edge,” or margin—i.e. on the shores of the Thames—is a Thames-side village improved utterly out of its olden country style. It is still a village, just as one may truly say that a commoner created a peer is still a man; but it is a village almost wholly composed of stylish up-river residences; and those few shops, a hotel or two, and a scanty sprinkling of cottages that exist here, do so only by way of ministering to the villa-residents. It is extremely difficult to come to the river banks here, except at the picturesque bridge that joins Goring with Streatley, on the opposite shore, for every piece of land and every access are jealously guarded, and there are not a few rights-of-way that may be observed by the observant to be artfully masked with hedges and screened by gates, or even decorated with lying “Private Road,” and “Trespassers will be Prosecuted” notices. The stranger who desires to wander at will is well-advised to disregard all such. The same new tale is told from the river, for boating-parties nowadays proceed up-stream or down between endless notices displayed on inviting riverside lawns and at seductive side-channels, to the effect that this, that, and the other are “Private”; “No Landing,” or “Private Backwater,” and the like.