Milborne St. Andrew is a pretty place, and those who know Normandy may well think it, with its surrounding meads and feathery poplars, like a village in that old-world French province. Almost midway along the sixteen and a quarter miles between Blandford and Dorchester, it still keeps the look of an old coaching and posting village, although the last coach and the days of road-travel are beyond the recollection of the oldest inhabitant. Here, in the midst of the village, the street widens out, where the old ‘White Hart,’ now the Post Office, with a great effigy of a White Hart, and a number of miniature cannons on the porch roof, waits for the coaches that come no more, and for the dashing carriages and post-chaises that were driven away with their drivers and their gouty red-faced occupants to Hades, long, long ago. Is the ‘White Hart,’ standing like so many of these old hostelries beside the highway, waiting successfully for the revival of the roads, and will it live over the brave old days again with the coming of the Motor Car? Meanwhile, given fine weather, there are few pleasanter places to spend a reminiscent afternoon in than Milborne St. Andrew. The old church is up along the hillside, reached with the aid of a bye-road. Its tower, like that of Winterborne Whitchurch, shows the curious and rather pleasing local fashion of building followed four hundred years or so back, consisting of four to six courses of nobbled flints alternating with a course of ashlar. A stone in the east wall of the chancel to the memory of William Rice, servant to two of the local squires here for more than sixty years, ending in 1826, has the curious particulars:-- He superintended the Harriers, and was the first Man who hunted a Pack of Roebuck Hounds. At a point a mile and a half farther used to stand Dewlish turnpike gate, where the tolls were taken before coming down into Piddletown. This large village is the ‘Weatherbury’ of some of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex stories, and the Jacobean musicians’ gallery of the fine unrestored church is vividly reminiscent of many humorous passages between the village choir in _Under the Greenwood Tree_. An organ stands there now, but the ‘serpent,’ the ‘clar’net,’ and the fiddles of Mr. Hardy’s rustic choir would still seem more at home in that place. Between this and Dorchester, past that end of Piddletown called ‘Troy Town,’ is Yellowham--one had almost written ‘Yalbury’--Hill, crowned with the lovely woodlands described so beautifully under the name of ‘Yalbury Woods’ in that story, and drawn again in the opening scene of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, where Gabriel Oak, invisible in his leafy eyrie above the road, perceives Bathsheba’s feminine vanities with the looking-glass.