[Illustration: REPTON.] [Illustration: THE "CROW TREES," BARROW-ON-TRENT.] The little old-fashioned town occupies some gently rising ground. This is separated from the broad and level water-meadows by a step or craglet a few feet in height, the scarp of an old river terrace; nearest to this are the church and priory buildings, which occupy a considerable tract of land, and look down upon the remnants of the monks' fishponds. The old trees that have here and there fixed their roots in the broken bank-side, the graceful steeple of the church, rising to an elevation of more than sixty yards, the great group of the school buildings--which occupy the site of the old priory, and in which new and old are mingled together in a picturesque confusion--offer, as we approach Repton from the railway station, along the flat and otherwise uninteresting valley, a series of pictures of no little beauty. The school owes its foundation to Sir John Porte, who in the year 1556 endowed it with lands, and assigned to it the buildings of the old priory. These had originally been granted to one Thomas Thacker, but, as is often the case with ill-gotten gains, had brought him little good. Fuller, the Church historian, tells a tale which shows him to have been a man not easily thwarted. At Repton St. Guthlac had a shrine, where was a wonder-working bell, a grand specific for the headache. Public gratitude had found expression in a fine church or chapel, and this was included in Thacker's share of monastic plunder. He had heard that Queen Mary had set up the abbeys again, so he lost no time, but "upon a Sunday (belike the better day the better deed) called together the carpenters and masons of that county and pulled down in one day (church work is a cripple in going up but rides post in coming down) a most beautiful church belonging thereto, saying he would destroy the nest lest the birds should build again."