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Show TRAVEL IN THE C0TSW0LDS They Strike Writer's Fancy as Being the Deep Hidden Nucleus of England. New York. Every country has its Inland, its places striking one as hidden hid-den in that country's heart, but these cotswolds have struck my fancy as being the deep hidden nucleus of England, Eng-land, writes Vernon Lee in the August Scribner. Perhaps it would be different differ-ent if I had reached these places by rail, followed the valleys, instead of rushing up and down these long, low slopes, associating them with long stretches of empty roads across pale pastures, and with the tempest of the motor's swiftness. The fascirration lies in this, that this remote country of crushed down hills and silted shallow shal-low valleys, so bleak and empty, holds r t A 1 1 fa fC Typical Cotswold Village Street. the traces of our oldest historic Eng land; of our great middle ages, as dif ferent from those of the continent ai these low hills and wide valleys ar aifferent from the hills and valleys o: tther countries. I mean those villages Chipping Hampton, Stowe-on-the-Wold Houghton-on-the-Hill, which, with theii one street of lovely 6tone cottages, oi small manor house and grarnmai school, their large and disgnifiec church of the times of the Edwards and Henrys, are really small towns unwalled, untowered, safe in the re moteness of our island and of its in nermost, oldest hills. Towns which with their wool stapling burgesses represent the life of England in Frois-sart Frois-sart days, explain the policy and pow er which went with Burgundy and Flanders against France, and fought Crecy and Agincourt. With their fin gray stone still fresh, they have also a certain knightly air suitable to sue! memories. They are gothic and theii houses have the shapes and ornament! of Elizabethan houses, and Oxford coi leges. My earliest impression of the cotc-wolds cotc-wolds is of the large village or little town of Paiuswick; high, bleak hillsides, hill-sides, pasture with stone hedges and beech woods visibly yellowing and rustling in the cold wind which sweeps the veil of rain in the wide valleys below. It consists mainly of handsome hand-some gabled stone houses, with well cut, lintels and string courses and slate roofs, of sixteenth or seventeenth century. |