Northamptonshire, which takes its name from Northampton, the county town (itself originally merely “Hampton,” and afterwards styled “North Hampton” for the express purpose of distinguishing it from Southampton), is an undulating shire of what Horace Walpole was pleased to style, rather aptly, “dumpling hills.” It is rich in building-stone of various kinds, largely of that beautiful golden-russet ferruginous sandstone, already referred to as “sugar-stone”; hence the fine substantial character of local buildings. Brick is not introduced largely into the architecture of its towns and villages. Fuller, who was a native of this shire, writing of it two hundred and fifty years ago, said there was as little waste ground here as in any county of England, and compared Northamptonshire with “an apple without core to be cut out, or rind to be pared away.” His praise was not extravagant, for the country contains little or nothing in the way of bleak heath or barren moor. This “shire of squires and spires” is also in old folk-rhyme that of “spinsters and springs,” and of “pride, poverty, and puddings,” ascriptions not readily to be understood, unless they be merely examples of a rustic passion for alliteration reduced to an absurdity; for spinsters abound in other shires, and no one surely would seriously contend that Northamptonshire was favoured above the ordinary in the matter of springs, conceit, pauperism, and puddings. But the spires are, at any rate, an indubitable and a beautiful architectural fact. Passing through Horton, we make a first acquaintance with them at Piddington, a village of the smallest dimensions with a church of the largest. Both are situated a few hundred yards off the road, the Early English church spire peaking up magnificently among the trees, with a peculiar richness of outline. Restoration recently in progress with the particularly vivid yellow-brown stone from the Duston quarries, two miles from Northampton, makes the restored patches stand out with glaring offensiveness; but Time will remedy that—as all other ills. [Illustration: PIDDINGTON CHURCH.] [Sidenote: _HACKLETON_] Hackleton, a large but rather characterless place, quickly follows upon Horton and Piddington, and is the last village before reaching Northampton, five miles away. Its position, the next place out of the town on the road to London, made it, in the days before railways a very special halting-place for drovers and the humbler wayfarers, and its inns were many. Superior to the rest was the “New Inn,” now a private residence, but for long years after it had retired from trade bearing on its front the legend “Wines and Spirits: Entertainment for Man and Beast”; with the not unnatural result that the privacy of the occupants was frequently invaded by seekers after that entertainment.