country, and in the course of a few more years, many a picturesque spot, that now ornaments the landscape, will be swept away, the manners and customs of the oldfashioned villages will be changed, and objects which have, time-out-of-mind, stood out like the bold bluff headlands that dot our coast, will disappear for ever. Nor do such scenes transferred to canvas stand out alone like "green spots in the desert waste," delighting only ourselves; but if well done, they multiply in engravings, and bring pleasant memories to a thousand hearths, carrying future generations back to the days of their "rude forefathers," and awakening many a dear remembrance, which but for them. would have slumbered until the day of death in the dark chambers of forgetfulness. Such pictures call up images of repose, and beauty, and love; some of us were familiar with them in the earlier years of childhood.-What poetical touches time hath given! How rich and mellow are the tints that memory throws over the whole landscape !— the winding road is filled with portraits, and we look calmly on that great gallery of the dead! This is but the imagination aroused while looking upon the sketch of a well-known scene. A portrait alone could not awaken

such recollections!

Many of our fine old English rivers abound in beautiful pictures, not of landscape alone, but of scenes that come and go, like the shifting effects of sunshine, cloud-coloured: where but a minute before we saw every object as if cut out in gold, the next changes to a dim bronze, and then shuts all in under a cover of dusky green. Under such a sky as this (when sun and shade come down to play with one another on the earth), what can look more picturesque than a large flat-bottomed old ferry-boat, creeping, as if half-afraid, from the further shore of the river, and throwing into the water, clear-shadowed, images of sheep and

oxen, the red cloak of an old market-woman, the blue smock-frock of some shepherd, and the white dress of the farmer's handsome daughter? Near and more near draws the huge square-headed boat, the splashing sound of the water broken by the bleating of the lambs, the lowing of oxen, and the voices of the passengers; heard for a moment, then lost again, just as the breeze rises and falls at intervals. How clear is the figure of the ferryman reflected, with his weather-stained jacket, as he leans over with the long boat-hook, rearing it at first, like a mast, above his head, then lessening it as the lumbering craft advances, now reaching but a yard above him, then coming to a level with his brawny shoulders, against which it rests, while with all his strength he walks the whole length of the boat, and red in the face as a lion, pushes her across the river. Up comes the long boat-hook once more, from out the clear water under which it was buried, high up in the sky it rears, making a hundred pretty dimples with the drops that fall from it; the same Herculean arm again plants it in the river-bed: if it slips, overboard he goes, as he has done many a time; on, onward another length he walks; he has given her plenty of head-way now, and she will soon come grinding upon the gravelly shore.

Dost thou love beautiful pictures which bring before the eye the still green rural scenes of pastoral England? If so, look on this. That white-washed old-fashioned building (partly covered with ivy), with its bay windows reflected in the river, is as ancient as the tall elm-trees that overtop it. It has been a public-house ever since it was built, and never was known by any other name than the Old Ferry House. It stood as it does now, with its twisted chimneys and gable-ends, when one summer morning four of Cromwell's iron-sided soldiers, who bore on their hel

mets the marks of Marston Moor, came across, "fiery red with speed," to hunt out an old royalist, who resided in the Elizabethan manor-house, which is still standing in the village. One may almost picture the old Puritans, with their pistols in their belts, and the bridles thrown over their arms, as they stand ready to leap out on the opposite shore. It would look well on canvas: one might tell by a glance at the countenance of the sturdy ferryman, that they would obtain but little information from him about the hiding-place of the brave cavalier. Look at the brown high road, which comes bending down the brow of the hill from the centre of the wood that shadows its summit, until it dips into the very edge of the river. That road is almost as old as the hill over which it stretches; over there and across the river has been the highway to the neighbouring market-town behind us ever since the time of the Saxons, for there was a ferry here when William the Norman compiled that gloomy catalogue, called Doomsday Book." There was once a wooden bridge a mile or two lower down the river, but it was swept away ages ago by a winter-flood, and was never again rebuilt. Tradition says that the ferryman who, then lived went down in his boat in the night, and sawed the middle piles of the wooden bridge asunder; but this is an old-world story, and all such ancient places abound in traditions. What groups descend the hilly road! How slowly that boy comes creeping down with his lambs: if he does not move quicker, the farmer on his chestnut horse will be at the ferry before him. How steadily the old woman comes trudging along in her scarlet cloak, with her black gipsy bonnet tied over her arm, and the basket steadied on her head; she has outstripped the old man in the blue frock, driving the donkey with its huge pair of panniers, which are filled with peas and new potatoes. That young lady in

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the riding-habit, who comes cantering along on her longtailed white pony, is the daughter of one of the richest farmers in the village; she is off a-shopping, and the young drapers will put on their best bows when she arrives. You should see with what grace she will enter the shop of the head milliner in the market-place, carrying her riding-whip in her hand, and holding up her habit as a duchess does her train on a drawing-room day: she has pulled up to gossip with the old woman in the scarlet cloak, who is one of her father's tenants; she will listen until they reach the ferry, and hear all about old John's rheumatics, and the goose the fox carried off the other night; the storm that blew down so many young apples; the fence the pigs broke through, and the cabbages and lettuces they consumed; and how near the old woman's daughter Deborah was of being married, when James "come to his harm" by a kick from the horse. And the young lady will persuade her father to mend the fence and replace the goose, and old John's rheumatics will be attended to-for the lady's grandmother is still alive, and grows no end of herbs in one corner of the garden, and has bottles filled with decoctions and lotions, which, with her presents of chicken broth and jellies, are found very strengthening.

Another ferry stands where the river rolls between two wild marshes, far removed from either town or village, the roads, which are said to have been thrown up by the Romans, run straight as a line within view of each other, stretching away for miles. Here the ferryman truly passes his life in solitude, for, saving at fair times or on market days, but few pass along that lonely road. His hut is the only human habitation which catches the eye in that vast extent of landscape. On both sides of the river the wide marshes are laid out for grass, and when the hay is harvested, hundreds of heads of cattle are turned loose, and may be heard lowing in

the wide solitude. No hedge rises up to break the monotony of the scene; the boundary lines are long water-sluices, where the bulrush bows and the water-flag waves, and acres of rushes grew up and wither year after year, uncut or unclaimed by living man. If" Boat-a-hoy!" is hailed by some stray traveller, up starts hundreds of tufted plovers, wheeling and shrieking above the wild sedge, and flying farther away, to allure the intruder from their concealed nests, which are often trampled into the sinking soil by the heavy bullock. When the marshes are cleared of cattle and silent, and the eye sees only for miles thousands of acres covered with long grass, catching every reflection from the sky, sunshine, and cloud, and the breeze that sweeps across, the scene looks not unlike a vast ocean, whose eddying waves are without a sound. There is a silent grandeur in its loneliness.

Beside the river stands the ferryman's hut, a low, lonelylooking building, its roof rising but little higher than the old Roman road, and his long, straggling garden, saving for its few trees, scarcely distinguishable from the green wilderness that spreads behind. An old ferry-boat, years ago sunk at the front of his house, and now filled with river mud, stands just as it was thrown, leaning upon the bank, by the flood, and is his chief defence against the ravages of the current; but for this wreck his hut might have been carried away long ago, like the summer-house he had built at the end of his garden, which, together with his large potato-bed, were all washed away in one night, after the breaking up of the ice on the river. In winter, when the waters are high, and roar and foam between the banks, his life is often in danger; more than once he has lost his boat-hook, and been carried away by the current, and cast upon a rugged wear, over which the water foams, and boils, and whitens, with a deafening