Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 13, 2025
Then they fell to talking of other things; and the honest old squire began to brag about his London days, and how he was once of Clement's Inn. "There was I, and little John Doit of Staffordshire, and black George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man; you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns o' Court again."
Waddington couldn't very well start on what he called his "campaign" until he was armed with his prospectus, and Pyecraft took more than a week to print it. And while she sat idle, thinking of her salary, the fiend of conscience prompted Barbara to ask him for work. Wasn't there his book? "My book? My Cotswold book?" He pretended he had forgotten all about it. He waved it away.
The first record of a pack of hounds being sold was in 1730, when a Mr. Fownes sold his pack to a Mr. Bowles. The latter gentleman showed great sport with them in Yorkshire. At that time Lord Hertford began to hunt the Cotswold country, in Gloucestershire, and was the first to draw coverts for fox in the modern style. Very soon after this it became the fashion of the day to breed hounds.
"All his successors gone before him hath done it; and all his ancestors that come after him may," added Davy, with pride. "To be sure, to be sure," said the squire. "Well, welcome to Cotswold, Master Shakespeare; good sportsmen are ever welcome on Cotswold. But tell me, how didst thou get thy downfall?"
And then once more we get the view we have seen so often on Cotswold; yet it never palls upon the senses, but thrills us with its own mysterious charm.
He is supposed to come out at sunset, like the foxes and the bats, and has been seen in the distance on bright moonlight nights striding over the Cotswold uplands. If any one approach him, he hurries away in the opposite direction; yet he is not queer in the head, but strong and in the prime of life. Then there is that very common character "the village impostor."
"Tell me, I prithee," answered Shakespeare, anxious to turn the conversation from his own share in the day's proceedings, "whose dog won the silver-studded collar this year in the coursing matches on Cotswold?" "Our Bill Peregrine, here, at the farm, carried it off. A prettier bit of coursing I never did see!" "Ah! that was the country fellow that turned up when we sounded the mort by Col-Dene.
"Well, but it's all Cotswold, you see. And he's Cotswold. If it is any good, you know, I shouldn't like to to well, get in his way. It's his game. At least he began it." "It's a game two can play, writing Cotswold books." "No. No. It isn't. And he got in first." "Well, then, let him get in first. You can bring your book out after." "And dish his?" "No, let it have a run first.
Fifty years ago, what with the wool from his sheep and the grain that was stored in these barns year by year, the Cotswold farmer was a rich man. Alas! Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis! One can picture the harvest home, annually held in the barn, in old days so cheery, but now often nothing more than a form.
His bees and fancy stock never paid him, but he always expected they would the next year. But they yielded him honey and wool of a certain intangible, satisfying kind. To be the owner of a Cotswold ram or ewe for which he had paid one hundred dollars or more gave him rare satisfaction.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking