In order to see Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at home, we must enter the town of St. Ogg’s — that venerable town with the red fluted¹ roofs and the broad warehouse² gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the medium of the best classic pastorals.

It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or the winding³ galleries of the white ants; a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial⁴ tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town “familiar with forgotten years.” The shadow of the Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing the scenes of his youth and love-time, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the dreadful heathen Dane, who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors⁶ by the sword of an invisible avenger⁷, and who rises on autumn evenings like a white mist from his tumulus on the hill, and hovers⁸ in the court of the old hall by the river-side, the spot where he was thus miraculously⁹ slain¹⁰ in the days before the old hall was built. It was the Normans who began to build that fine old hall, which is, like the town, telling of the thoughts and hands of widely

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