Ugly church, ugly steeple, Ugly parson, ugly people. In short, only the handsomest of men with the most amiable of natures can possibly afford to take the living of Ugly, for should the parson be plain, the obvious remarks as to his peculiar fitness for the place would become a burden to him, and unless of an angelic disposition, his “ugly temper” might be commented upon. Fortunately Ugley is among the smallest of places, and therefore the Ugley girls with feelings to be scarified by such a description are few. But, on the other hand, how easy the way to a most ingratiating compliment, in the exclamation of surprise:— “You come from Ugley? Impossible!” “Why impossible?” “Because——” But here you fill the hiatus to your own individual taste in flattery. The embarrassments of such a place-name are many, and are not so easily surmounted as those of the Scilly Islanders, who are “Scillonians,” rather than Scilly people. Ugley, however, has a near neighbour in misfortune, in the hamlet of Nasty, to be found by the curious, scarce more than ten miles away, between Great Munden and Braughing, in Hertfordshire. Ugley is said to have been the “Quercetum” of the Romans, so named by them “from the locality abounding in oaks.” In Domesday Book it is “Uggheley,” and it is even found written by some ancient vulgarian as “Huggele,” a really h’odious variant. [Illustration: UGLEY CHURCH.] Ugley church is situated, as I have here made effort to show, in a very pretty setting of trees. They are not oaks, as they should be; but that would be to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” of allusion, and we must not expect such fitness and completeness. It is a small church, placed just outside a farmyard, but stands otherwise solitary and unheeded by those who keep the main road. It might be thought the Georgian red-brick tower was built on to the ancient body by some one concerned to make it fit the place-name—for it is not beautiful—did we not know that Georgian towers, and churches too, were commonly hideous, and this, therefore, by no means exceptional. But the kindly aid of Nature has done much here, and “that rare old plant, the ivy green,” has mantled the stark design to such purpose that it now gives the ideal rustic effect presented by the literary efforts of Gray’s “Elegy,” and the artistic convention of Birket Foster’s drawings. Its note is one with the Christmas cards of our youth, when no one was ashamed of such pictures as that of the old parish church in the snow, or the Robin Redbreast on his spray of holly. XII