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The hoped-for house made its appearance just in time, not in the neighbourhood of Uxbridge, but in the outskirts of the quiet little town of Watford. Thither Mr. Conder and his family removed at Midsummer, 1824, when the pleasant sojourn at Chenies terminated, and there the following fifteen years of his life were spent.

As the volume of poems above referred to has for many years been out of print, and it is doubtful if they will ever be reprinted, the reader may not be displeased by the insertion of the following two sketches of Buckinghamshire scenery, which will answer for any other autumn, as well as for one thirty years ago. The village clocks have ticked out the last moments of a whole generation since then, and a second generation reaps the harvest; but the same beech woods slope down to the meadowy valley, and the trout stream murmurs among the rushes and under the drooping boughs the same song as of old :—

"For men may come, and men may go,

But I go on for ever."

The first of these sonnets is from Mrs. Conder's pen; the second from Mr. Conder's own hand. In the original volume they form half of a series of four sonnets on "Autumn."

I.

A glorious day! The village is a-field:

Her pillow'd lace no thrifty housewife weaves,
Nor platters sit beneath the flowery eaves.
The golden slopes an ample harvest yield;
every hand that can a sickle wield

And

Is busy now. Some stoop to bind the sheaves,
While to the o'erburden'd waggon one upheaves
The load, among its streamers half conceal'd.

* "Star in the East," etc., pages 173, 174.

CHENIES.

We heard the ticking of the lonely clock

Plain thro' each open door, all was so still. For, busily dispersed, near every shock

Their hands with trailing ears the urchins fill. Where all is clear'd, small birds securely flock,

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While full on lingering day the moon shines from the hill.

II.

Now that the flowers have faded, 'tis the turn
Of leaves to flaunt in all their gayest dyes.
"Tis Autumn's gala: every dryad vies
In decking out her bower. How richly burn
The gorgeous masses in the amber skies,
Where to the west, the valley, with its stream,
Is shut with woods that drink the setting beam
There by its crimson foliage one descries
The cherry, thrown out by the auburn shades

Of beech, with russet oak, and hoary sallow,
And greenest ash, bearing its golden keys,

With here and there wych-elm of paler yellow. How gracefully the waning season fades!

So Nature's every dress and every look can please.

CHAPTER VI.

WATFORD.

EVERYBODY knows where Watford is; for it is a station on the North-Western Railway, and everybody has travelled by the North-Western Railway. Everybody knows how the railway sweeps in a quarter-circle round the quiet little town, as if it liked to look at it, but thought it a pity to touch it; and how, rushing over the viaduct, which seems, by its length and loftiness, a standing mockery of the quiet little river that wanders beneath it amongst water-meadows and rows of pollard willows, the "down express" sweeps past a pleasant picture of houses girdled with hedge-rows and corn-fields; the old church, picturesquely odd and charmingly ugly, keeping guard over the other buildings, like an old sentinel asleep at his post, and the modest Baptist chapel in ambush, as it were, among the trees; how it flashes past the station, and between the steep chalk banks of the deep cutting, and plunges into the darkness of a milelong tunnel.

But thirty years ago, everybody did not know where Watford was. Railways and locomotives were among the undeveloped possibilities of the future. Any one who had talked of travelling from London to Birmingham in four hours, and of crossing the Atlantic in a week, would have been laughed to scorn as a hair-brained enthusiast; and any one who had foretold, that within

A GENERATION AGO.

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forty years, we should talk round our dinner-tables in London of what has been done and said the same morning in New York, or, in a few years more, in Pekin and Australia, would have run great risk of being shut up as a madman. It would have been as ridiculous and absurd as to have asserted that spoons and forks would be plated or gilded by electricity, and portraits painted by sunbeams; or that Papists and Dissenters might be admitted to Parliament, and the corn-laws abolished, and yet the British Constitution survive the shock.

In those quiet old days-only a generation ago, yet separated by what a wide intellectual interval from this sixth decade of the century!-Watford was a most quiet little country town, exceedingly well-known by the four thousand people who dwelt there, but not very widely known to the rest of the world. It possessed the usual

features and social elements of a small market-town in an agricultural district, with no staple trade or manufacture. There were the neighbouring nobility and gentry, who made their appearance on great occasions, as at public meetings, concerts, or county elections. There were triumphant Tories, and wistful Whigs. There was the vicar, an earl's nephew, generally to be seen on a fine day, with his portly figure, white trousers, and jovial face, chatting with his parishioners; or not seldom, in the hunting season, riding through the street (there was but one street), in his scarlet jacket and white cords. There was the dissenting minister who preached at the quaint little old Baptist chapel (since superseded by a modern structure), the secluded position of which, entrenched among crooked back-lanes, told of the times in which Nonconformity had been fain to seek safety in obscurity. There were two or three rival lawyers, and two or three rival doctors, and two rival principal inns,

one with a gentlemanly landlord, the other with an unparalleled waiter. There was the retired great bookseller, and the great brewer preparing to retire, and the great nobody, at the great white house, and the great man, who drove about in a little chaise, because he was too bulky to walk, never went to church because he could not get into his pew, and was credibly reported. always to eat a leg of mutton as a precaution before he went out to dine. There were rich millers and farmers, and well-to-do shopkeepers, and hard-working cottagers, too many publicans, and a full average of beggars and scamps. There were electioneering squabbles (for the county), and great savings' bank questions, and great right-of-way questions; and, in later years, a great Reform banquet and illumination; and, as in most small country towns, where everybody knows everybody, a great deal of gossip. As the town lay several miles off the Great North Road, there was no great amount of traffic passing through. Two or three London coaches, on their way to Chesham, Hempstead, or some other town further down in the country, were the modest substitute for long railway trains, with their two or three hundred passengers. A few lumbering carriers' vans represented the "goods trains" of later and more impatient times. Every night, the mail-coach, with its flaring eyes and red-coated guard, made the quiet streets echo to its horn, picked up, perhaps, its one passenger, and excited mysterious feelings of respect and wonder in the minds of little boys. All around the dear, dull, quiet little town lay the still more quiet country. Two minutes would bring you into it; on the one side across the little river Colne, into green low-lying meadows, which the artificially-raised banks do not keep the stream from overflowing for miles after very heavy rains; on the other, through the lime

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