roads, along which in one direction went the Exeter mails, while at right angles goes the road between Southampton, Winchester, Newbury, Didcot, and Oxford, little used now, but once an important route. Whitchurch, in the gay old times when few men had votes but every voter had his price, used to send two members to Parliament. Horrid Reform and Bribery Acts which, together with the extension of the franchise and the adoption of secret voting, have brought about the disfranchising of rotten boroughs and the decay of such home industries as electoral corruption, personation, and the like, have taken away much of the prosperity of the town, which, like Andover, used to live royally from one election to another on the venality of the ‘free and independent.’ But the last visit of the ‘Man in the Moon’ was paid to Whitchurch very many years ago, and not even the oldest inhabitant can recollect the days when cash was given for votes and the electors, gloriously and incapably drunk, were herded together to plump for the candidate with the longest purse. When it is said that Whitchurch is a tiny town of very steep, narrow, and crooked streets, that it still boasts some vestiges of its old silk industry, and that it is a ‘Borough by prescription,’ all its salient points have been exhausted. Reform has not only reformed away the Parliamentary representation of the town, but has also swept away the municipal authority. Mayor and bailiff are both elected every year, but the offices carry no power nowadays. Leaving Whitchurch, the road presently comes to the village of Hurstbourne Priors, which stands in a hollow on the Bourne, an affluent of the Anton, and on the verge of the Ancient and Royal Forest of Harewood. Not only does the village stand on the banks of the stream and the edge of the woods, but it also derives the first of its two names from these circumstances, ‘Hurstbourne’ being obviously descriptive of woodlands and brooklet, while the ‘Priors’ is a relic of its old lords of the manor, the abbots of Saint Swithun’s at Winchester. These historic and geographical facts, however, are apt to be lost in the local corruption of the place-name, and that of Hurstbourne Tarrant, a few miles higher up the stream; for they are, according to Hampshire speech, respectively ‘Up Husband’ and ‘Down Husband.’ XIX [Sidenote: _ANDOVER_]