The only new house in Kelmscott village is one built to preserve the memory of this man who wrought such beautiful things and preached doctrines so impossible; and on the front of it is a very ornate tablet, bearing a portrait-medallion. The work is, however, in such low relief and so elaborated that it is difficult to be clearly distinguished. Away through the scattered village, and out at the other end, stands the little decayed parish church of St. George: decrepit and surrounded in most melancholy fashion by spindly overhanging lime-trees. The place oppresses the stranger, even on summer days, with gloom, which is increased as he walks up the dank little pathway to the south porch, among the serried graves of a numerous local family, each one within his concrete bed. The quite plain headstone to William Morris is close by. There is no feeling of this melancholy in the account written by Morris, in his _News from Nowhere_, of a village church; but which was evidently a description of this: “We went into the church, which was a simple little building with one aisle divided from the nave by three round arches, a chancel, and a rather roomy transept for so small a building, the windows mostly of the graceful Oxfordshire fourteenth-century type. There was no modern architectural decoration on it; it looked indeed as if none had been attempted since the Puritans whitewashed the mediaeval saints and histories on the wall.” The building is chiefly of Early English date, consisting of nave, chancel, rudimentary north aisle of a makeshift character, and north and south transepts and clerestory. There is a rough tub-font. Some traces of ancient colouring are found on the round-headed arches of the nave-arcade; while the accompanying illustration will show that the sculptured capitals of the columns are of great, if simple beauty, and doubtless studied in the long ago from the water-plants of the Thames. [Illustration: KELMSCOTT CHURCH.] Nothing can equal the calm delights of those still, hushed hot days of early summer on these reaches of the upper Thames, when the tall sweet grasses of the meadows by which we float are ripening to the scythes of the reapers, and before the birds have quite finished their wild torrent of springtime mating song. Here, with the boat drawn up beside some tall sheaf of growing rushes, we may listen to the twittering distant song of the skylark, flying, an almost invisible speck, high up in the intensely blue sky; and may see the water-rat swimming across the stream. Cows gaze with a mild curiosity from the banks, under the welcome shade of the willows, or recline, with a certain lumpish dignity, among the buttercups and daisies. The fragrance of spring is yet in the land, and that man who, lazing here, lights a cigarette, and so imports an alien fragrance, offends against his environment. [Illustration: FARINGDON CLUMP.]