shaft belonging to them, short or tall, always excites interest where it has been spared. But here are the original carved cross-heads themselves, set on the original shafts, in the original proportions, on the original sites; they are scarred indeed, but not by the hand of man. Quite tiny villages, like Calmsden and Duntisbourne Rouse, as also Inglesham, Cricklade, and the Ampneys, richly reward any who would study medieval crosses in detail.

The social life of the Cotswolds, in what is left of it, is singularly cohesive. Architecture has always been the most intimate expression of the popular temper, and it is natural, where good building prevails, to look for good economics. The brilliant democracy of the guilds of the Middle Ages is gone, and nothing has ever really replaced it. It seems like a dream, among these "high wild hills and rough uneven ways," to recall all the princely woolstaplers who belonged to the staple of Calais, owned the lands, stocked them and lived upon them, and gave them their renown.

But

now "Burnigan," like some great sucking sea-devil, draws the young folk away from home and home interests. The male stay-at-homes are almost all elderly, going about in big scarves and corduroy coats. They are, however, far from unhappy. Cotswold labour is well-paid, and labourers' rents are low. A serviceable and attractive cottage of four large rooms, detached, well-situated, with a garden, may be had for five or six pounds a year.

A twenty-pound cottage, new or old, is truly or old, is truly a home of parts. Many of the fine ancient manors have come into the hands of farmers. You fall across these manors in exquisite lonely situations, among venerable box-edged gardens run to seed. Perhaps, if it be shearing-time, you see a flock of the top-heavy tailless Cotswold sheep bleating under a giant cedar in the lee of the barn, and the shepherds sharpening their shears on an old mountingblock, one used by riders who laid them down under an Orate long before Bosworth fight. The scene is patriarchal and encouraging. Working-folk so busied should make a success of rural life. Sua si bona norint ! Will they let "Burnigan" spoil it all? The women are born conservators here as elsewhere. The "byes" over sixteen go, but most of the girls stay. As they grow up, they do not remove the laden ham-rack on the old beam which crosses the kitchen, nor banish the crane from the huge low fireplace. They learn at home to cook well. (Everybody knows how little good or even passable cooking one usually finds in the Midlands to-day !) There is always a grandmother at hand, with her precious lore of herbs and simples, and her precious science (may it never die out for lack of demand!) of brewing from from cowslips, dandelions, elderberries, and gooseberries, from the plebeian but practical parsnip, wild sloes, and even the hips and haws of the autumnal wayside. It is sad to recognise that the old dairy industries are dying

To speak of "the average American" is to speak of something that there is not. Uncle Sam's family to-day, with its ninety odd million members, is too big and too heterogeneous in its composition to permit of striking an average, or showing up a national type. Any attempt to draw that picture in a few words, as an ambassador recently presumed to do in Paris, may at once be set down as something akin to squaring the circle, or following the asymptote to its point of junction. The varieties of people are so many, and their occupations and modes of life are so utterly diverse, that one might as easily blend, say, the Slavonic of Northern Europe and the Latin of the South.

In the first place, America lacks the homogeneity of older lands. Espoused by birth to the principles of freedom and the policy of the wide-open door, and with her vacant wildernesses and infinite resources crying for and luring the eager, the enterprising, the overcrowded, and the downtrodden of other nationalities, she has been drawing life-blood from the world at large. Socrates was wont to assert that he was a representative and citizen, neither of Athens nor of Corinth, but of the Universe. The inhabitant of the United States cannot quite come up to the wide-minded old Grecian's claim, but he can at least say that he fairly represents the

globe. Throughout the States there is one prevailing tongue, and also, to a large extent, there are common institutions; but there the uniformity ends. Between New England and the Rio Grande frontier, as between Alaska and the Florida Keys, there are dissimilars that cannot be embraced in one abstract generalisation. Even in the city types there are the widest variations. In how far could the dweller in the cultured city of Boston, which, by the way, is thought by some to resemble more a city of our own land than any other in the States, be classed with the hustling cosmopolitan of San Francisco? Or could one begin at all to depict what could be recognised as a type of New York, with its human ant-heap of five millions of restless, striving, struggling beings collected from every corner of the civilised and semi-civilised world. An upto-date scientist might, with a full equipment of mind-reading, nerve-force estimating, pulsecounting, brain-weighing instruments, and a pencil and sufficient foolscap, get at the virtuous and vicious propensities and possibilities of the people, but it would be only a matter of columned figures after all.

It is said that in facial appearance, in shape of skull, and in the nature of his hair, the American is gradually tending towards the type of the original Indian of his continent.

If

this be actually the case, and a close observer can sometimes see instances of families where he could unhesitatingly say that it was,-it can arise only from the effect of the physical and geographical conditions that evolved the original red man. Intermixing of the races can have little or nothing to do with it. Such mingling of the bloods as has taken place must be quite inappreciable, having been confined to the frontier localities, and there only to any degree during the time when certain land grants were being allotted by the Government to those who could show Indian strain. Considerable intermarrying took place then, but that "squaw-man period was of short duration. In their zeal to furnish credentials of the required percentage of red man blood, of which fluid nobody was ashamed to show a blend, many, it is alleged, merely succeeded in proving a strain of nigger, which, besides debarring them from participation in the land divide, was always esteemed highly disappointing.

Of course the negro halfbreed, the quadroon, and the octoroon are common enough in many Southern States, while the dusky cuticle, kinky hair, and the tell-tale darkey finger-nail, manifest and proclaim themselves to some extent throughout the States, despite the most stringent laws prohibiting inter- marriage of white and black. These African evidences, however, are mainly to be seen among the lower classes, for there are lower

classes in the United States, hard as it is for these said classes to admit it. When any such evidences are detected, they place the individual on a par with the blackest, and that, in the eyes of most Americans, is pretty low. A thin black thread in the composition of a man is enough to preclude him from ever being acknowledged as a brother countryman by the white man of either North or South. Indeed there are some Americans who would resent, to the point of blood effusion, a stranger daring to discuss with them the negro in the light of such relationship. As illustrating this low status of the negro, it may be mentioned that in many States he is not allowed a vote, no matter of what tax-paying substance he may be, or of what education. In view of the fact that he was, in his past fettered days, and still is, of great use in upbuilding the country, the discrimination between him and the erstwhile tomahawky - troublesome and now loafing and only partially self-supporting Indian seems inconsistent. Still, it is the "colour-line," and toed it is most rigidly. Brother Jonathan owned his black brother once, but he does not do so now, in any sense of the word. Both these races are increasing in numbers, the Indian slowly, and the negro with the cumulative speed of a geometrical ratio. Some day the Rouge et Noir problem is going to be bigger and tougher to solve than it is at present.

Everybody knows that the