At Bury St. Edmunds Defoe tolls us how in a pathway between two churches a barrister of good family attempted to assassinate his brother-in-law whom he had invited with his wife and children to supper. On excuse of visiting a neighbour he led him to the ambush of a hired assassin. They left their victim for dead, horribly mangled on the head and face and body with a hedgebill. He lived to bring them to justice, and was living still when Defoe wrote. But the assassins had been condemned to death “on the statute for defacing and dismembering, called the Coventry Act.” This Tour also recalls the days when Bury was a place of fashionable holiday resort. Defoe meditates upon the decline and fall of Dunwich, tells of the coming and going of the swallows from our east coast, and of innumerable swallows whom he saw one day waiting for a favourable wind on the roofs of the church and houses at Southwold. We read of the coming up to London of the Norfolk turkeys on foot, in droves of from three hundred to a thousand, and so many droves that by one route alone, and that not the most crowded—over Stratford Bridge—a hundred and forty thousand birds travelled to London between August and October. In Norwich, Defoe was less interested than in Ipswich; but of Yarmouth his account is full, and the frequency of wrecks on the east coast, especially about Cromer Bay, which seamen called the Devil’s Throat, is illustrated by the fact that in all the way from Winterton towards Cromer that “the farmers and country people had scarce a barn, or a shed, or a stable, nay not the pales of their yards and gardens, not a hog sty, but what was built of old planks, beams, wales, and timbers, etc., the wrecks of ships, and ruins of mariners’ and merchants’ fortunes.” Defoe saw the races at Newmarket, where he was “sick of the jockeying part.” He went also to Bury Fair, of which he gives a full description, and at Cambridge he paid honour to the University. There was another Tour told in letters so near to Defoe’s in date and form that the first or second volume of one work is often sold with the second or first volume of the other. The book not by Defoe was entitled “A Journey through England in Familiar Letters from a Gentleman” here to his friend abroad, in two vols., 1722, with a third volume on Scotland in 1726. All editions published after Defoe’s death in 1731 have matter added by others. The addition of new matter began with the novelist Samuel Richardson in 1732. Some time afterwards there were changes announced as “by a gentleman of eminence in the literary world.” H. M. TOUR THROUGH THE EASTERN COUNTIES OF ENGLAND, 1722.