The head of the Kennet, like that of most chalk streams, however, is a winter bourne--a fact sufficiently proclaimed by the names of two villages about its source, as in many similar cases throughout the chalk counties. Its upper channels, that is to say, relapse into a dry bed through the summer months above the point where some strong unfailing springs, welling up beneath the chalk, mark the commencement of the perennial flow. After laving with thin and feeble streams the skirts of some half-dozen downland villages, keeping company in the meantime with the London and Bath road, the Kennet, with a rapid accession of vigour from subterranean sources, approaches Marlborough as quite a well-grown little river. Brushing the walls of the little Norman Church at Preshute, and skirting its chestnut-shaded graveyard, it now coils through the level meads, beyond which spring the stately groves that half conceal the ancient Queen Anne mansion of the Seymours, with its wide lawns and terraces and clipped yew-trees and lime walks, where the College has been so felicitously seated for nearly seventy years. Hugging the foot of Granham Hill, where one of the five white horses of Wiltshire, cut large upon the chalk, is conspicuously displayed, it plunges into a mill pool, and then soon afterwards, stealing beneath an old brick bridge, disappears into a maze of orchards, gardens, and foliage, which spread back from the old High Street of Marlborough. Parallel with the river, and lying back on the gentle slope that rises from it, the quaint, wide, tilted-up street runs a long straight course from church tower to church tower. Of Roundhead proclivities in the Civil War, but much battered and held for the King through most of it, and burned nearly to the ground soon afterwards, Marlborough is beyond question the most characteristic and interesting of the Kennet towns. It was a great coaching place, of course, but of more than ordinary Bath-road notoriety, since for a long time the Seymour mansion and grounds, the present College, was the finest hostelry in England, and extremely popular with fashionable travellers for what we should now call "week ends." During the Middle Ages a royal castle stood on its site, and was constantly the abode of kings and queens.