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Arrived at Transham, that little town upon a hill which the Morton Plough Works had created, they were soon in Stanley's car, whirling into the sleepy peace of a Worcestershire afternoon. Would this young bird nestling up against him echo Flora's verdict: 'I feel all body there! or would she take to its fatted luxury as a duck to water?

An old maxim of the Worcestershire labourer who, without a fixed place, took on piece-work at specially busy times, will confirm this: "Go to a good farmer for wheat-hoeing, and to a bad one for harvesting."

Mary Rotheram wanted to go to Bredon Hill in Worcestershire, because she had always wanted to ever since she had learned a song which began: "In summertime on Bredon The bells they sound so clear; Round both the shires they ring them In steeples far and near, A happy noise to hear.

"Mr. Alexander Pope," says he, "before he had been four months at this school, or was able to construe Tully's Offices, employed his muse in satirizing his master. This Bromley, it has been ascertained, was the son of a country gentleman in Worcestershire, and must have had considerable prospects at one time, since it appears that he had been a gentleman-commoner at Christ's Church, Oxford.

How miserable it is to look forward twenty years, when the same child, now grown a man, wakes in the morning with a dull, heavy head, the consequence of smoking and studying till twelve or one the night before; when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this and tries that, wants a deviled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his office and his books.

The chief summits are the North Hill, rising eleven hundred and fifty-one feet above the Severn, the Worcestershire Beacon, fourteen hundred and forty-four feet, and the Herefordshire Beacon, thirteen hundred and seventy feet. Their highest parts are covered with verdure, and nearly seventeen hundred different varieties of plants have been found on the range.

They are aggregations of pretty villas, and the many invalids who seek their relief are drawn about in Bath-chairs by little donkeys. The view from the Worcestershire Beacon is grand, extending over a broad surface in all directions, for we are told that when the beacon-fires that were lighted upon this elevated ridge warned England of the approach of the Spanish Armada,

William had, as yet, conquered little more than the South of England: hardly, indeed, all that; for Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and the neighboring parts, which had belonged to Sweyn, Harold's brother, were still insecure; and the noble old city of Exeter, confident in her Roman walls, did not yield till two years after, in A.D. 1068.

Another later story still is told about a priest in Worcestershire who was kept awake all night by the people dancing in his churchyard and singing a song with the refrain 'Sweetheart have pity', so that he could not get it out of his head, and the next morning at Mass, instead of saying 'Dominus vobiscum', he said 'Sweetheart have pity', and there was a dreadful scandal which got into a chronicle.

Herefordshire and Worcestershire were in a flame. The city of London, though not so directly interested, was, if possible, still more excited. The debates on this question irreparably damaged the government. Dashwood's financial statement had been confused and absurd beyond belief, and had been received by the House with roars of laughter.