In one or other of the quiet backwaters between this and Oxford there may be found, by those who care to seek, the curious aquatic plant known as the “water-soldier.” Botanists of course know it by another, and a horrific, name: to them it is “_stratiotes aloides_.” But to those few rustic folk who know at all of its existence—and it is not a common affair—it is the “water-soldier.” It does not, however, convey any military impression to the ordinary beholder, being just a plumed bunch of leaves which in summer-time is found floating on the surface; coming up from its autumn, winter, and spring home below, in the river-mud, and growing long suckers, resembling strawberry runners, each of them with a youthful “soldier”—or recruit, shall we say—at its end. These form leaves, and each one produces a white flower. When these flowers fade the “water-soldier” and its outposts of young sink again to the river-bed, and there rest until summer comes again, when the process is repeated. But what of Cumnor? It looks boldly down upon the Thames Valley from a conspicuous wooded ridge. It is a village picturesque alike in itself and in its romantic history, traditions, and legends. Figure to yourself a place of scattered rustic cottages, not yet touched to commonplace by that shrinkage of distances caused by the rapidity and frequency of modern methods of travel which have brought expansions, rebuilding, and general modernisings in their train; with an ancient and stately church rustically overhung with trees quite in the old Birket Foster and first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century convention. That is Cumnor to-day. [Illustration: CUMNOR CHURCH.] In Domesday Book the place appears as “Comenore,” but we hear of it in Anglo-Saxon times as “Colmonora”; and it is supposed to have obtained the first part of its name from one St. Colman, or Cuman, a seventh-century Gaelic saint. The termination, “ora,” doubtless refers to the shores of the Thames; not, however, nearer than a mile and a half, and at a considerably lower level. Cumnor had, apparently, an early church, replaced by the existing fine Transitional Norman and Early English cruciform building, not yet ravaged by the “restorer.” Cumnor Place, built about 1350, as a sanatorium for Abingdon monastery, after the fearful experiences of the “Black Death” pestilence, stood very closely adjoining the picturesque churchyard, on its south side, and, after several changes of owners, and at last sunk to the condition of a roofless ruin, was finally demolished in 1811, and its stones used in the rebuilding of the church at Wytham. There is much of interest belonging to Cumnor church, from the battered old altar-tomb in the churchyard, with barely legible inscription, to Lieutenant William Godfrey, “who faithfully served King Charles ye I. from Edgehill Fight to ye end of ye unhappy wars,” down to the curious epitaph on the exterior east wall, upon “Christian, the wife of Henry Hutt”: