was a dearly loved corner of England for John Loveday, and if to keep those meadows safe and fair a life was required, he was perfectly willing to pay the price--nay, more, he was proud and glad to do so. In the end John was killed in one of the battles of the Peninsular War, and his spirit is echoed by a soldier poet who went to his death in 1914: "Mayhap I shall not walk again Down Dorset way, down Devon way. Nor pick a posy in a lane Down Somerset and Sussex way. But though my bones, unshriven, rot In some far-distant alien spot, What soul I have shall rest from care To know that meadows still are fair Down Dorset way, down Devon way." The mill is not the one sketched in the tale, but it still grinds corn, and one can still see "the smooth mill-pond, over-full, and intruding into the hedge and into the road." The real mill is actually at Upwey. Bincombe, two miles north-east of Upwey, is one of the "outstep placen," where the remnants of dialect spoken in the days of Wessex kings is not quite dead, and as we go in and out among the old cottages we come upon many a word which has now been classed by annotators as "obsolete." "I'd as lief be wooed of a snail," says Rosalind in _As You Like It_ of the tardy Orlando, and "I'd as lief" or "I'd liefer" is still heard here in Bincombe. There is a large survival of pure Saxon in the Wessex speech, and Thomas Hardy has made a brave attempt to preserve the old local words in his novels. He has always deplored the fact that schools were driving out the racy Saxon words of the West Country, and once remarked to a friend: "I have no sympathy with the criticism which would treat English as a dead language--a thing crystallised at an arbitrarily selected stage of its existence, and bidden to forget that it has a past and deny that it has a future. Purism, whether in grammar or vocabulary, almost always means ignorance. Language was made before grammar, not grammar before language. And as for the people who make it their business to insist on the utmost possible impoverishment of our English vocabulary, they seem to me to ignore the lessons of history, science, and common sense.