Great Faringdon—how humorously that epithet sounds to a Londoner!—is unprogressive in the best of these senses. You do not find, on approaching it, the ragged slummy selvedges that fringe the towns where commerce thrives so abundantly, where the rich grow daily richer, and the poor daily more abjectly and helplessly impoverished. No matter from what direction you approach Faringdon, along none of the five entrances to the town do you see mean suburbs spreading grimly into the shamed fields, nor plentiful notice-boards declaring “This eligible land” to be “ripe for building.” Faringdon’s expansive days are done, and no man can see the likelihood of their return, for, although the town is situated on such a network of highways that travellers by road can scarce get about the neighbourhood without going through it, the great days of the road are passed, and the motor-car is not going to bring them back in that old sense. The last blow was delivered at the chances of Faringdon’s expansion when the main line of the Great Western Railway was carried four miles to the south, past Uffington, whence a small branch line comes, to serve the town, and stops here. Faringdon is an historic place, but its history ceased to be a living thing at so remote a period that it seems, to many who do not trouble to come to close quarters with it, to be a very dryasdust history indeed. It is largely the history of the Saxon kings, to many of whom Faringdon was a favourite place of residence. But of all these times, and of later royal visits, no tangible record is left; and the Faringdon of to-day is just an ancient market-town that contrives to live quietly on the needs of the surrounding agricultural population. In a rapidly-changing England, this town is one of a few that, made to stand aside from the ways of modern trade, remain very much what they have been during the last two centuries. The last incidents that ever stirred the pulses here were election contests, and the last issues in the larger sort that disturbed town and district were fought out so long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century, in the attack and defence of Faringdon in the Great Rebellion. Then the Royalists held the town and Faringdon House, the seat of the Pye family, behind the church. The Pyes had been in possession of the property only some twenty-three years when the troubles broke out, having purchased it in 1622. They were then on the popular side, Sir Robert Pye, indeed, having married the sister of John Hampden, the patriot, who lost his life at Chalgrove Field. Greatly to his mortification, the Royalists had seized and garrisoned his mansion, and it fell to his lot to besiege it. The elder of the two sons of this Sir Robert was that Hampden Pye, born in 1647, who is the subject of the _Ingoldsby Legend_ of “Hamilton Tighe,” “a _sobriquet_ interfering neither with rhyme nor rhythm,” as the author justly claims. The legend