No one could justly declare the village of Stogursey to be picturesque. Nor is it ugly; but at the radiant close of some summer day, when an afterglow remains in the sky, the village takes a beautiful colouring that cries aloud for the efforts of some competent watercolourist. It is an effect, as you look eastward down the long broad village street to the church, standing in a low situation at the end, of a rich red-yellow, like that of a ripening cornfield, on houses, cottages, and church alike, with the lead-sheathed spire gleaming like oxidised silver against the chilly blue-grey of the eastern sky at evening, spangled already, before the sun has finally gone to bed, with the cold, unimpassioned twinkle of the stars. Daylight heavily discounts this romantic effect, for then you perceive that the lovely hue on the church-tower at evening was the dying sunset’s transfiguration of the yellow plaster with which the tower was faced at some time in the Georgian period. But Stogursey has a castle, or the remains of one, styled by villagers “the Bailey.” The stranger looks in vain for it in the village street. Stogursey Castle stands in a meadow, surrounded by a stream which in the olden days was made, not only to form the moat, but to turn the wheels of the Castle mill. The mill-leat still runs on one side of the lane branching from the main village street; a lane now smelling violently of tanneries, and lined with cottages of a decrepit “has been” character; for it should be said that Stogursey is a decaying place. Changes in method of agriculture; changes in methods of communication, making for swifter and cheaper import of corn and other products of the soil; changes, in fact, in everything have all conspired to injuriously affect the place. The few remaining local shops do not look prosperous, and the village is full of private houses whose windows clearly show them to have once been shops, that gave up the pretence of business long ago. These bay-windowed, many-paned shop-fronts retired from business are familiar all over rural England. The villagers generally turn them to account as conservatories for geraniums and other flowers, and a pleasant sight, treated in this way, they often are. But there is a future for the Stogursey district; if not for the shopkeepers, certainly for the farmers. No light railway yet serves it, but the need of such an enterprise is great; and when it comes it will effect great changes in local fortunes. [Illustration: STOGURSEY CASTLE.] “Stoke,” as it was styled originally, is a place of greater antiquity than any neighbouring village, as its name would imply; indicating as it does a stockaded post in a wild and dangerous district innocent of settled houses.