There is a great deal more of Weedon than the hurried traveller along the Holyhead Road would suspect. It lies down the turning by this same old house and on the other side of the parallel embankments of railway and canal; embankments so tall that they succeed in completely hiding all but the upper stage of Weedon Church tower. “Here,” says that tower, “is Weedon”; and there it is; barracks like model lodging-houses, with children playing and clothes drying upon tier over tier of balconies; women fresh from the washtub, with arms akimbo and rolled-up sleeves, voluble in the entries; and soldiers “married on the strength,” slatternly and listless, at the windows: all very domestic and inglorious. The everyday aspect of the barracks is not inspiring. Only occasionally, when on the neighbouring hillsides a sabre-scabbard flashes by chance in the sun, and the eye thus startled discovers some leisurely horseman scouting, visible to all the world, is the military view of Weedon productive of a thrill. Many soldiers lie in the crowded churchyard round the ugly church, jammed in an angle between railway and canal: the trains rushing by on a lofty viaduct that looks down upon the damp, sunless and melancholy wedge of land. Among those soldiers lies “Charles Lockitt, who died August 27th, 1877, in the fifty-third year of his age. Deceased was formerly a sergeant in the 97th Regiment, and was present at the storming of the Redan before Sebastopol, September 8th, 1855, where he was severely wounded, from the effects of which he died.” A much older, and somewhat curious epitaph, is that to “Alice Old, widow, who lived in ye reigne of Queen Elizabeth, in ye reigne of Kinge James ye 1st, in ye reigne of Kinge Charles ye 1st and Kinge Charles ye 2nd, and Kinge James ye 2nd, and deseased ye Second Day of Jany., ye 3rd year of ye reigne of Kinge William and Queen Mary, 1691.” XXIX No wild geese, according to an ancient fable, ever again spoiled the cornfields of Weedon after they had once been banished by the miraculously successful prayers of the Princess Werburgh, a holy daughter of Wulfere, King of Mercia, somewhere about A.D. 780. That pious lady, afterwards raised to the hierarchy of saints, was abbess of a religious house here. Her steward assembled the birds: the abbess commanded them to depart, and they immediately took wing, but refused to leave the neighbourhood until a missing one of the flock (killed, cooked and eaten, as it happened) was restored to them. Nothing easier than this to a Saxon saint, and the bird was restored alive to his friends and relations! “The vulgar superstition,” says an old writer, “now observes that no wild geese are ever seen to settle and graze in Weedon field.” Nor in any other field nowadays, it may be added, in this modern England of ours.