The ominous Battlesden Park, belonging to the Dukes of Bedford, with jealously locked lodge-gates that hinder the harmless tourist from inspecting the church within the demesne, is one of a vast chain of Russell properties stretching for miles across country, from here to Woburn and away to the Great North Road at Wansford. Battlesden is without a tenant, except for those who tenant family vaults and resting-places in the little churchyard: Duncombes within and nobodies in particular without. It was one of these Duncombes of Battlesden—Sir Samuel—who in 1624 introduced Sedan-chairs into England. Weeping marble cherubs on Duncombe monuments, rubbing marble knuckles into marble eyes, testify to grief overpast, but Nature, indifferent as ever, keeps a cheerful face. It here becomes evident that we are on the borders of a stone country, for the little church tower is partly built of that ferruginous sandstone whose rusty red and yellow is for the next thirty miles to become very noticeable. Gaining the summit of Sandhill, a house lying back from the road, on the left, is seen, with traces of a slip-road to it and through its grass-grown stable-yard. It is a noticeable red-brick house, with a steep tiled roof crowned by a weather-vane. Once the “Peacock” inn, it has for many years been a private residence. A short distance beyond, past the cross-roads known as Sheep Lane, Bedfordshire is left behind for the county of Buckingham, through which for the next twelve miles, to the end of Stony Stratford, the Holyhead Road takes its way. Buckinghamshire, on the map, is a quaintly shaped county, standing as it were on end, washing its feet in the Thames at Staines, and with its head in the Ouse, in the neighbourhood of Olney. Wags have compared it with a cattle-goad, “because it sticks into Oxon and Herts.” The glimmerings of possible similar verbal atrocities are apparent in the fact that it is also bordered by Beds and Berks. Northants and Middlesex also march with its frontiers. Its name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “bucken,” alluding to the beech woods that spread over it, but more particularly in the south, on the densely wooded Chiltern Hills. The Welsh language, innocent of any word for the beech, bears out the statement of Cæsar, that this tree was unknown in Britain at the time of his invasion.