to see where she is buried?" Such was Jane Austen's fame so near the place of her birth!

"My dear," said Miss Cassandra, with a glint of something like tears in her kindly gray eyes, "I want to tell thee that I was named for Jane Austen's mother. Thee must know that although my father was a Friend he always enjoyed a good romance. Walter Scott was his delight; but above all others he placed Jane Austen. I have seen him laugh over some of Mr. Bennett's witticisms until the tears rolled down his cheeks, and when he was looking about for a name for me my mother suggested Elizabeth, as the name of his favorite heroine."

"Why not Jane?" I asked.

"Why, thee sees I had a sister Jane; but just at that time there came out a sketch, in one of the magazines, about Jane Austen and her family, in which her mother, Cassandra Leigh, was described as a witty, clever, and charming woman from whom Jane inherited much of her ability, and forthwith my father named me Cassandra. Jane also had a sister Cassandra to whom she was devotedly attached."

'And so you see our cheery Miss Cassandra is not named after the Trojan lady of dismal prophecy. After this revelation, nothing would have induced us to give up the trip to Steven

ton. Fortunately St. Swithin ceased to frown, and the sun shone forth after luncheon.

There is nothing especially picturesque or inspiring about the little village of Steventon or the parsonage, which, it appears, is not the same house in which the novels were written, as that was pulled down some years since. We may believe, however, that the old-fashioned garden is much the same, and the "turf terrace" exactly answers to the description of the terrace in "Northanger Abbey." Miss Cassandra also called our attention to the Hampshire hedges, or hedgerows, to which Jane Austen so frequently refers. Quite different from the ordinary English hedge, the Hampshire hedge is-sometimes a path, and sometimes a cartroad bordered with copse wood and timber. The hedges at Steventon were called the "Wood walk" and the "Church walk." The latter led to the church, and to a fine old manor house of the time of Henry VIII, to whose grounds the little Austens had free access.

Seeing this small village, situated among the chalk hills of North Hants, and the hedges, and the rather monotonous and uninteresting country in which Jane Austen lived when she was painting her "little bits of ivory two inches wide," caused us to wonder more than ever at

the touch of genius that gave interest and vitality to everyday and somewhat commonplace characters and events.

Although the Austens afterwards lived at Chawton Cottage, on the Winchester highway, it was her early home at Steventon that is most often reflected in Jane Austen's novels. Miss Cassandra says: "It is very much with Jane Austen as with the Brontës; she was true to the Hampshire that she knew, just as 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' breathe the Yorkshire moors in every line."

If we have never been to Haworth, Miss Cassandra says, "go and see the parsonage with the graveyard beside it, and walk across those desolate moors, and then you will understand something of the life and genius of those wonderful women. ""

How I should love to go! but is there any end to the interesting things we could do in England? From Winchester we could make a dozen literary pilgrimages, Charlotte Yonge's home is at Otterbourne, and John Keble's at Hursley, both near Winchester; Massinger, Fielding, and Joseph Addison all lived at Salisbury; and only three miles away is Wilton, of carpet fame, where Philip Sidney wrote his "Arcadia" and George Herbert his hymns. Charles Kingsley's