kind. But Bedford is, of course, a unique type of place: an old town which would no doubt be given over to John Bunyan, as its obscure neighbour Olney is to Cowper, if the presence of some 3000 school boys and girls and their much less occupied belongings had not submerged its past in a whirl of modernity at work or play. Gliding slowly onward, full of lusty chub and hungry pike, of bream and roach, amid scenery that a certain school of landscape painter dearly loves, and so slowly that the weeds in places almost choke its bed, the Ouse drops down another dozen miles to St. Neots. This place, which seems to have some affinity with the same saint that is honoured in a Cornish town, is very much on the Ouse. It is a fine broad river by this time and washes the back gardens of the houses as you enter the main street of the town, which is dominated by an imposing church of the late Perpendicular period. Hence both the highway and the great northern main line follow the valley of the Ouse to Huntingdon. Much the most important person--though of course fortuitously so, and merely because he kept an invaluable journal which has escaped destruction--associated with this stage of the river is Samuel Pepys, whose house at Brampton is still standing. At Godmanchester, only a mile short of Huntingdon, the Ouse contributes more conspicuously than ever, assisted by a great mill-pool, to the beautifying of an old-fashioned place where, as at St. Neots, and just beyond at Huntingdon, are numbers of those pleasant old eighteenth or early nineteenth century residences standing just back from the road in well-timbered grounds or bowery gardens. Huntingdon follows quickly, and of course the memory of the great Protector altogether dwarfs that of the poet Cowper, who resided here with the Unwins in a house still standing near the church before he moved to Olney. One ought to quote one or other of the various lines and couplets that this very gentle bard has devoted, incidentally as it were, to this very gentle stream. But it is not, I think, fair to a poet of merit and letter-writer of much more than merit, to print fragments that, taken by themselves, have in this case none whatever. But Huntingdon bridge with its six arches is much older than either Cowper or Cromwell, being almost certainly of early mediæval origin. In the heart of the pleasant town, where its long narrow High Street opens into a square, is "All Saints Church," with its battlements and crocketts and its fifteenth-century origin written all over it. [Illustration: THE OUSE, HOUGHTON MILL, HUNTINGDONSHIRE] [Illustration]