water-rails and snipes picked what they could with the woodcocks in the syches, as many witnessed in the Minsterley Woods and in the Hill Beck and Dripping Sych at the Oaks, to say nothing of the little warm bubbling springs about Hanwood and Meole and Sibberscot. The Old Oak said that he hardly remembered such a time, and added that the rooks and the crows, as well as the thrushes and the blackbirds, which alighted on his branches were nothing but feathers and bones. As for the partridges, they died in scores, and the poor little quails (of which there were many in those days, and were pleasant to hear whistling and calling on an autumn night) seem to have been annihilated for years-even on the Newnham Ground, which they always frequented, as they did in the days of my boyhood, when I gathered the cotton-grass, which grew plentifully in the swampy ground beneath the knolls.

The Rev. Benjamin Wingfield, as has been stated before, was now the Rector of Hanwood, though I think he did not much reside; and he it was who told the people at the old homestead at Meole that the Severn was quite frozen over, and that a sort of a fair was being held upon it, and that a printing press was set to work. The news soon spread amongst the people, and within a day or two they got a holiday and off they trudged-and sure enough there was a fair beneath the Welsh Bridge, and they saw a sheep roasted on the ice, and tumblers and jugglers showing off their feats, and the man at work at his printing press!

Since the frost in 1684, when so many had perished, and even oaks were split and riven, there appears to have been none more severe than this. Of the earlier one such is the entry in a London citizen's diary: 'The frost this year was terrible. It began in the beginning of December 1683. The people kept trades on the Thames, as in a fair, till February 4, 1684. About forty coaches daily plied on the Thames as on dry land. Bought this book at a shop upon the ice in the middle of the Thames.' Pretty much the same is said of the frost of the year we are now treating of. Swift says in writing to Mrs. Whitway: It is impossible to have health in such desperate weather; but you are worse used than others.

Every creature of either sex is uneasy; for our kingdom is turned to be a Muscovy or worse.' And again: 'I have been many days heartily concerned for your ill-health; it is now twenty-five days since we have found nothing but frost and misery, and they may continue for as many more. This day is yet the coldest of them all'-i.e. January 18, 1740.

On speaking of trees being killed by frost my Talking Friend observed: 'There is a mighty difference between heart of oak in our native forests, such as the Stiperstones and others, and the poplar and the plane tree planted by the hand of man in the Shrubbery,' so proud was he of his position.

One evening towards the end of this year the millers on the Rea returned from Shrewsbury and told how a part of the covering of the market-house there had fallen down and killed two of a brother miller's horses that stood under it; for which they were very sorry, but glad to have escaped themselves, as their own horses were standing close by at that very time. Eleanor Guinum, and Elinor Pan, of Hanwood, were in the town that day, and had had some of the new drink called 'tay,' i.e. tea, at Betty Altræ's, who lived in the Sextry, leading out of Kiln Lane into the High Street-the present King's Head Street. They both of them told their neighbours they thought it but poor stuff.

It should be mentioned here that my Talking Friend constantly heard people speaking of 'THE GREAT COMMONER' of those days. It is hardly necessary to say that this was the great William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, who was worth more to the nation than the great diamond which his grandfather, who was Governor of Madras, brought home with him. The people, says Lord Mahon, considered him their best and truest friend, and when he was promoted to an earldom they still felt that his elevation over them was like that of Rochester Castle over his own town of Chathamraised above them only for their own protection and defence.

In mentioning the names of celebrated men it may be always noted how local circumstances tend to keep up their memories. This was the case with Anson-the well-known George, Lord Anson-voyager and admiral-to whom the French commander said, as he delivered up his sword on the

capture of the 'Invincible' and the 'Glory,' 'Monsieur, vous avez vaincu "l'Invincible," et la " Gloire" vous suit.

This great and adventurous man (though something, it must be said, of a buccaneer, even in the capture of galleons) was well known by name in these parts, owing to the tickney-ware which passed up and down in panniers from Staffordshire in which county he was born-at Colwich, about three miles from Rugby. It was natural enough for the Staffordshire crockery-carriers to speak of the great hero, and as natives they did so in no measured terms. It was satisfactory to the Old Oak to hear them speak of the wooden walls of his old ship the 'Centurion,' which did him such good service. Had they not been of oak,' he said, 'they never could have weathered the storms they did!' It may be added that he lived to convey her Majesty to England in 1761 from Cuxhaven. He was buried at Colwich on June 14, 1762, and there is a monument to him in the church. In his latter days he is said to have taken to play, but was not a clever hand at such work; whereupon a wag remarked that, 'though he had been round the world, he seemed to know very little about it after all!'

One morning I was refreshing myself beneath the shade of my Talking Friend, and, as it chanced, Dick Hinley came by with a great heron dangling in his hand. He had been ordered to watch what was called 'The Big Pool,' which at that time was filled with the fry of young carp and tench, and had shot it as it lighted there. He told me how it flew up 'pendle' (i.e. perpendicular, as a wounded pheasant towers), and how he brought it down with the old duck-gun-a marvellously long gun of those days used in duck-shooting and for killing larks. When he left me to show it to his master I was aware, by the rustling of his leaves, that the Old Oak had something to say; and so, being used to the token, I was all attention. Presently he began :

'Dick Hinley, as we call him, is no great favourite with the people-his eye is too grey and his lips are too thinbut he is shrewd and clever, and no man can spy a hare on her form, or catch her, better than he; and I'll be bound on my oakship to say if there's a badger left in the country, or

if a squirrel's dray be wanted, he is the man of all others to find it. But, somehow or another, even I am not fond of him, and he is about all hours of the night.' And then he added, 'Somewhere about the time you were just speaking of there lived in this neighbourhood a very good man, and a great favourite, owing to his quiet, inoffensive habits, by name Oliver Vaughan, whose occupation was that of a thatcher; but when he had nothing else to do he was what would now be called an ornithologist, or bird-fancier, or something of that sort; no one in the country knew the habits of birds so well. He would sit and watch the beautiful arrow-like kingfisher by the hour, and he said it was astonishing the number of fishes he would take, and that his very nest was in part made of their bones. So, again, he would watch the heron, with his one leg up in the shallow shady side of a pool, so as not to disturb a minnow by a splash; and he constantly saw him draw out the eels from the mud in one of the Arlescott ponds. So clever was he that he could bring the land-rails near him with a common comb, and no Spaniard was possessed of a better quail-call than his, though it was of the simplest construction possible. There was no one but loved Oliver Vaughan !'

One day last year, when I was with my old Christ Church friend, G. W. Batchellor, now rector of that lovely spot, Trotton in Sussex, he told me that in the preceding summer some one had brought them a tame fishing cormorant, and he expressed himself very glad that there were no wild ones in that part of the country, for if they had not a ring about their necks to prevent them from swallowing their prey, they should never have a trout out of the stream. What a rest for a cormorant were a great stone beneath that most lovely of all lovely bridges! Pity it was that Otway ever left that charming village!

But I do not know if cormorants, though they are easily tamed, have been ever used to fish with in England much, but in China it is a common custom, and a thong is fastened round the throat to hinder them swallowing what they catch. Milton methinks, hath done the bird some injustice.

Since the days of the second George many birds have

become very scarce in the valley of the Rea. The heron even can hardly be called common, and as for the bittern-which could then be heard booming in every marsh between Meole and the Stiperstones by night-this fine bird has become so rare as scarcely ever to be seen or heard of-rare as the old chough in Cornwall, 'only to be found,' Mr. L'Estrange says, ' in the cover about Gew-graze.'

In those days my Talking Friend spoke of the prosperity of the valley of many clearances of wood having been made and of draining the land so as to clear it of sedges and rushes. But it was many years before much advance was made in this way, and in my younger days all the fields that lay near the Rea were in winter the haunts of snipes and plovers--the peewit, or common plover, generally, but every now and then a flight of the golden, especially in the fields between Newnham and Yockleton, which they seem to affect most. The quiet haunt of the peewit, in latter days, was Polmer Pool— an outlying piece of water which has been alluded to before in our local narrative.

Late in the spring of 1743 the whole road from Bishop's Castle to Meole, Hanwood, and Shrewsbury rang again with an account of a cold-blooded murder which had been committed. The first news of it was brought by old William Hughes of Edgebold, who stopped on his way at the old homestead of Meole, as he was in the habit of doing whenever he passed that way. My Talking Friend's bones quite shuddered as he spoke of it, and he added that 'it was a rare thing to hear of bloodshed in these parts.' I find this mention made of the murder in Phillips' History of Shrewsbury,' under 1743.

'One Cadman'- -a name with which we are familiar-'a shearman, returning from Bishop's Castle with the excise money from the collector there to the drapers in Shrewsbury, was robbed and murdered near Norbury by Woollaston and his son Edmund, both of Bishop's Castle. They were both taken. The father hanged himself in gaol, but the son was hanged in chains near Norbury.' The murder was committed on May 12, and the Old Oak was right.

Of the French invasion the next year in the interests of