From Harleston, then, we started nothing loth, having accomplished so far only some thirty miles in 3-1/2 hours, of which, however, only 1-1/2 had been spent in travelling. Plans we gave up for a bad job; we determined simply to go on as long as we could and, if trouble came, to grin and bear it. The first scene noted after Harleston was Flixton Park, a very noble deer park over which the eye can range from the car, for it is divided from the road only by thin but very high iron railings. The Hall was built by Sir Nicholas de Tasburgh in the time of bluff King Hal, and the church tower is said to be Saxon. But we were all for travel. Such was the mood in which we passed through Bungay, leaving Ditchingham a mile or two to the left. The reader, it is hoped, will not travel through Bungay quite so quickly, will not, be it hoped also, have suffered quite so many punctures and bursts, and will be in the mood to hear something of it and of Ditchingham. This district has its _vates sacer_ in Mr. Rider Haggard, whose book, _A Farmer's Year_ (Longmans, 1899), is, in its rare passages of topography and of old-time talk, exquisitely attractive to man or woman of taste. It appeals also, in its agricultural record, with infinite sadness and with much force to all who have been brought face to face with the realities of life in rural England. Let there be no shiver of apprehension here. There is no intention of raising here that question of the unnatural war between the cities and the country as part of the propaganda relating to which this book was written. Mr. Haggard, indeed, avows openly his desire to convert as many persons as possible to his way of thinking, and this, to put it shortly, is that to permit the cities to starve out rural England is a hideously mistaken policy. The subject is fertile; but it is not for me. What is of enthralling interest to all is that in Mr. Rider Haggard we have a gentleman of estate who, after much travel, after serving his country in diplomacy and in other ways in South Africa, and after being called to the Bar (which after all happens to a good many men without making much difference to them), retired to farm his own acres of heavy land, and some others in Norfolk, during the very worst period of agricultural depression. He had done, and he did, much more than this. When he settled down at Ditchingham to farm, and to do his duty as a country gentleman, he had written a round score of books of which the graphic power was, and is, universally admitted. Men have laughed at the impossibilities of _She_ and of _King Solomon's Mines_, but very few have laid them down unfinished; they have spoiled many a hundred beauty sleeps; their absorbing interest and their skill of words is beyond question. All that power of words Mr. Haggard devoted to his propaganda and, perhaps, by way of make-weight for passages on "blown" cattle, bush drains, and the preparation of land for barley--things which interest me deeply, but are