Aston Tirrold and Aston Upthorpe make a square of roads with many lanes and paths crossing from one side to another. In the square are big houses and small, and their gardens and old, nettly orchards, and many sycamores, elms, chestnuts, and acacias in the gardens and along the paths; there are even some small fields within it. Running water goes through it. Here you pass a mud wall, there a hedge, here a boarded, there a thatched, and again a tiled, cottage. At some of the corners and in the churchyard stand lime trees. If a happy child had all the ingredients of old villages to play with, it would, if it were ingenious, probably combine them thus. The farms are all outside the square but close to it. The churches are near the edge but within it. I hardly believed that anybody remained alive in the village until I failed to open the door of Aston Tirrold Church. Aston Upthorpe church was a small tiled building with a stupid little spire stuck on yesterday, to show that it was not part of the neighbouring tiled farm and outhouses. The village hid itself well on both sides under its elms. From the east it seemed all trees and orchards, from the west only the new thatch of a rick betrayed it. My road led along the south side of the village and commanded a simple, perfect piece of downland--a bare, even wall of down with an almost straight ridge, which was also bare but for one clump; along the foot of the wall ran the main road to Wantage; up from it, an old trackway, very deeply worn, rose slanting and showing one old steep green bank, up to the ridge and over; and at the point where the trackway crossed the main road the turf was carved by a chalk-pit. [Illustration: Blewbury.] A broad track and several parallel paths went fairly straight without hedges, westward through the corn to Blewbury, passing close under the south side of a bare, sudden hill--Blewburton Hill--and the ramparts of a supposed Danish camp. Blewbury was like Aston, with a streamlet, many trees and orchards, and a towered church standing in the midst of several paths and roads. The clock was beating slowly with such gigantic and ancient peace inside the church that I did not enter. It was as if some hoary giant were sleeping inside away from the sun, if indeed he had not been there for some centuries. Outside the church lay a dilapidated and weed-grown pair of prostrate effigies. If it were not disturbing the sleeper in Blewbury Church I should suggest that these effigies might be taken in. They are much to be preferred to the clean effigies which have never borne the weather of God or the pocket-knives of men; but if they are left outside much longer they will hardly pass as representations of two human beings lying on their backs.