LETTER IV. We have now taken leave of the inside of the church, and shall pass by a door at the west end of the middle aisle into the belfry. This room is part of a handsome square embattled tower of forty-five feet in height, and of much more modern date than the church; but old enough to have needed a thorough repair in 1781, when it was neatly stuccoed at a considerable expense, by a set of workmen who were employed on it for the greatest part of the summer. The old bells, three in number, loud and out of tune, were taken down in 1735, and cast into four; to which Sir Simeon Stuart, the grandfather of the present baronet, added a fifth at his own expense: and, bestowing it in the name of his favourite daughter Mrs. Mary Stuart, caused it to be cast with the following motto round it: "Clara puella dedit, dixitque mihi esto Maria : The day of the arrival of this tuneable peal was observed as a high festival by the village, and rendered more joyous, by an order from the donor, that the treble bell should be fixed bottom upward in the ground, and filled with punch, of which all present were permitted to partake. The porch of the church, to the south, is modern, and would not be worthy attention did it not shelter a fine sharp Gothic door-way. This is undoubtedly much older than the present fabric; and, being found in good preservation, was worked into the wall, and is the grand entrance into the church: nor are the folding doors to be passed over in silence; since, from their thick and clumsy structure, and the rude flourished work of their hinges, they may possibly be as ancient as the doorway itself. The whole roof of the south aisle, and the south side of the roof of the middle aisle, is covered with oaken shingles instead of tiles, on account of their lightness, which favours the ancient and crazy timber frame. And indeed, the consideration of accidents by fire excepted, this sort of roofing is much more eligible than tiles. For shingles well seasoned, and cleft from quartered timber, never warp, nor let in drifting snow; nor do they shiver with frost; nor are they liable to be blown off, like tiles; but, when well nailed down, last for a long period, as experience has shown us in this place, where those that face to the north are known to have endured, untouched, by undoubted tradition for more than a century. Considering the size of the church, and the extent of the parish, the churchyard is very scanty; and especially as all wish to be buried on the south side, which is become such a mass of mortality that no person can be there interred without disturbing or displacing the bones of his ancestors. There is reason to suppose that it once was larger, and extended to what is now the vicarage court and garden; because many human bones have been dug up in those parts several yards without the present limits. At the east end are a few graves; yet none till very lately on the north side; but, as two or three families of best repute have begun to bury in that quarter, prejudice may wear out by degrees, and their example be followed by the rest of the neighbourhood1. In speaking of the church, I have all along talked of the east and west end, as if the chancel stood exactly true to those points of the compass; but this is by no means the case, for the fabric bears so much to the north of the east that the four corners of the tower, and not To precept our excellent author added the weight of example. He lies buried in the open ground on the northern side of the chancel; a low head stone and foot stone, bearing his initials and the date of his death, mark the fifth grave from the church wall, in which were deposited his perishable remains.-E. T. B. M M the four sides, stand to the four cardinal points. The best method of accounting for this deviation seems to be, that the workmen, who probably were employed in the longest days, endeavoured to set the chancels to the rising of the sun. Close by the church, at the west end, stands the vicarage house; an old, but roomy and convenient edifice. It faces very agreably to the morning sun, and is divided from the village by a neat and cheerful court. According to the manner of old times, the hall was open to the roof; and so continued, probably, till the vicars became family-men, and began to want more conveniences; when they flung a floor across, and, by partitions, divided the space into chambers. In this hall we remember a date, some time in the reign of Elizabeth; it was over the door that leads to the stairs. Behind the house is a garden of an irregular shape, but well laid out; whose terrace commands so romantic and picturesque a prospect, that the first master in landscape might contemplate it with pleasure, and deem it an object well worthy of his pencil. LETTER V. In the churchyard of this village is a yew-tree, whose aspect bespeaks it to be of a great age: it seems to have seen several centuries, and is probably coeval with the church, and therefore may be deemed an antiquity: the body is squat, short, and thick, and measures [upwards of] twenty-three feet in the girth, supporting a head of suitable extent to its bulk. This is a male tree, which in the spring sheds clouds of dust, and fills the atmosphere around with its farina. As far as we have been able to observe, the males of this species become much larger than the females; and it has so fallen out that most of the yew-trees in the churchyards of this neighbourhood are males: but this must have been matter of mere accident, since men, when they first planted yews, little dreamed that there were sexes in trees. In a yard, in the midst of the street, till very lately, grew a middle sized female tree of the same species, which commonly bore great crops of berries. By the high winds usually prevailing about the autumnal equinox, these berries, then ripe, were blown down into the road, where the hogs ate them. And it was very remarkable, that, though barrow-hogs and young sows found no inconvenience from this food, yet milch-sows often died after such a repast: a circumstance that can be accounted for only by supposing that the latter, being much exhausted and hungry, devoured a larger quantity. While mention is making of the bad effects of yewberries, it may be proper to remind the unwary, that the twigs and leaves of yew, though eaten in a very small quantity, are certain death to horses and cows, and that in a few minutes. A horse tied to a yew hedge, or to a faggot stack of dead yew, shall be found dead before the owner can be aware that any danger is at hand: and the writer has been several times a sorrowful witness to losses of this kind among his friends; and in the island of Ely had once the mortification to see nine young steers or bullocks of his own all lying dead in a heap from browzing a little on a hedge of yew in an old garden into which they had broken in snowy weather. Even the clippings of a yew hedge have destroyed a whole dairy of cows when thrown inadvertently into a yard. And yet sheep and turkeys, and, as park-keepers say, deer, will crop these trees with impunity. Some intelligent persons assert that the branches of yew, while green, are not noxious; and that they will kill only when dead and withered, by lacerating the stomach: but to this assertion we cannot by any means assent, because, among the number of cattle that we have known fall victims to this deadly food, not one has been found, when it was opened, but had a lump of green yew in its paunch. True it is, that yew trees stand for twenty years or more in a field, and no bad consequences ensue: but at some time or other cattle, either from wantonness when full, or from hunger when empty (from both which circumstances we have seen them perish), will be meddling, to their certain destruction; the yew seems to be a very improper tree for a pasture field. Antiquaries seem much at a loss to determine at what period this tree first obtained a place in churchyards. A statute passed A. D. 1307 and 35 Edward I. the title of which is "Ne rector arbores in cemeterio prosternat." Now if it is recollected that we seldom see any other very large or ancient tree in a churchyard but yews, this statute must have principally related to this species of tree; and consequently their being planted in churchyards is of much more ancient date than the year 1307. As to the use of these trees, possibly the more re |