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much to the purpose. For one dish I must eat because 'dis is Germany,' and another because 'dis is England,' placing at the word a large slice of roast-beef on my plate. The dinner began at half-past two, and lasted three mortal hours, during the first of which I ate because I was hungry, during the second out of politeness, and during the third out of sheer desperation." Then there is a descent into a silver-mine with the present Lord Wemyss (better known as Lord Elcho), a gruesome execution of three murderers, and a good deal besides of some interest, but the interest is not of Suffolk.

So, passing over the six years in Dorsetshire, where my father married, we will come back to Suffolk, where in 1845 he succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham.

Monk Soham is a straggling parish of 1600 acres and 400 inhabitants. It lies remote to-day, as it lay remote in pre-reformation times, when it was a cell of St Edmundsbury, whither refractory monks were sent for rustication. Hence its name (the "south village of the monks"); and hence, too, the fish-ponds for Lenten fare, in the rectory gardens. Three of them enclose the orchard, which is planted quincunx-wise, with yew hedge and grass-walk all round it. The "Archdeacon's Walk" that grass-walk should be named, for my father paced it morning after morning. The pike, and roach would plash among the reeds and water-lilies; and "Fish, fish, do your duty," my father would say to them. Whereupon, he maintained, the fish always put out their noses and answered, "If you do your duty, we do our duty,"—words fully as applicable to parson as to sultan.

The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, Thomas Rogerson, was sequestrated as a Royalist in 1642, and next year his wife and children were turned out of doors by the Puritans. "After which," Walker tells us, "Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very mean Cottage upon a Heath for some years, and in a very low and miserable Condition." But if Monk Soham has no history, its church, St Peter's, is striking even among Suffolk churches, for the size of the chancel, the great traceried east window, and the font sculptured with the Seven Sacraments. The churchyard is pretty with trees and shrubs those four yews by the gates a present from FitzGerald; and the rectory, half a mile off, is almost hidden by oaks, elms, beeches, and limes, all of my father's and grandfather's planting. Else the parish soon will be treeless. It was not so when my father first came to it. Where now there is one huge field, there then would be five or six, not a few of them meadows, and each with pleasant hedgerows. There were two "Greens" then—one has many years since been enclosed; and there was not a "made" road in the entire parish—only grassy lanes, with gates at intervals. "High farming " has wrought great changes, not always to the profit of our farmers, whose moated homesteads hereabouts bear old-world names Woodcroft Hall, Blood Hall, Flemings Hall, Crows Hall, and suchlike. "High farming," moreover, has swallowed up most of the smaller holdings. Fifty years ago there were ten or a dozen farms in Monk Soham, each farm with its resident tenant; now the number is reduced to less than half. It seems a pity, for a twofold reason: first, because the farm-labourer thus loses all chance