It is strange that that same identification was not made in a book published in 1905. I mean Miss Eleanor G. Hayden’s _Travels Round our Villages_. She lived at West Hendred, yet described her village as lying between two roads known on the map as the “Portway” (the main road between Wantage and Reading) and Ickleton Street, adding that they were known “locally as the ‘Turnpike’ and the ‘Ridgeway.’” Evidently she had not heard the people talk of “Ickleton Street” or “Ickleton Meer.” Yet her books prove her familiar with country people and country places as are few writers of country books. Her _Travels_ and her _Turnpike Travellers_ and _Islands of the Vale_ gave the materials for an exceptionally full picture of country life. Nothing was beneath her, and her love was equal to her curiosity. She was exceptionally modest, and put down everything with no obvious intention except fidelity to her own eyes and ears. She could be dull, and if you opened the book at random you might be disappointed; but if you read a whole chapter you were certain to be delighted. So many books are written by bungalow countrymen that we have got used to pretty things, surprising things, pathetic things, country equivalents of the music-halls and museums of towns. There were plenty of good things in Miss Hayden’s books. She was not afraid of quoting country talk at some length for its own sake, but she did not miss such things as the cottager’s “strutty little hen,” who was “a deal better Christ’n nor many what calls themselves sich,” and the lonely shepherd’s answer to the question what he and his family did without a doctor--“We just dies a nat’ral death.” She appeared to make good books as others darn stockings, because of the abundant material. She gave a natural monotony and a natural charm. She showed us a village girl curtseying seven times to the crescent moon; children playing with the old mill machinery after the cheap loaf had killed it; labourers at a tug-of-war over a brook; a cavalier and lady of the old manor-house; a crossing stream, a beautiful garden, a village kitchen, a recipe for Christmas pudding and one for sloe gin, and many things from old parish accounts. But nobody bought her books. If she had given them to some journalist to mince, spice, warm, and dish up, he might have made a book of the season from them, and by now it would have been dead. Hers will last somehow or another as long as an old wall.