to see, a cottage or two, and an inn-a nice little open town, not overcrowded.

It is beyond my powers to describe that wonderful doorway to the little church. Slippery serpents climb up and down trees of knowledge or of life. Adam looks scared, and dragons with other monsters are in such an endless tangle that enthusiastic decipherers of symbolism might become confused and driven crazy. Round the eaves of the church are seventy grotesque heads of fiends, some of them with long curling tongues, and if the original devils from which these were copied had tongues anything like as long, they must have been very unpleasant to live with. When the house known as The Towers (afterwards the birthplace of the Ship Canal) was built at Didsbury, a prize was given to the sculptor who made the most hideous gargoyle; but modern imaginations failed to conceive the monstrosities of the good old times. when men heard more of and took more interest in the legions of the devil.

There is a fine old font, and another, ages older, formed of the squat figure of a man cut off at the breast, the lower part of his body forming the basin which his hands and arms enfold. Some one connected with this little, though long forgotten, church must once have had a lively fancy and indulged himself in art. The age of this curious font is doubtful, though probably some wiseacre of a reviewer would fix it up exactly, and say the style shows that the work was done on the first of April in the seventh year of King John.

It was almost dark when the photograph of the doorway was done, and it was quite impossible to take anything inside the church, therefore the font and beautiful arches of the interior had to be left. How the fine work about the door ever came out" is a mystery, for thick darkness soon enfolded all the country round.

LEDBURY-MUCH MARCLE

T

HE next morning found us at Ledbury, quite an important town in that district, for there were donkey-carts with merchandise and fox-hound

puppies playing in the street. The sight of those mischievous young hounds reminded me that a pack was named after the town. The market-hall is one of those picturesque old market-steds reared aloft on columns of wood and framed of timber, but in this case the sixteen supporting columns are not of oak, but of the edible or Spanish chestnut that were grown on Malvern Chace. Behind the market-hall a very narrow lane leads to an enormous church of many styles and ages. There is much to interest, from the ancient squint to the bullets in the door, the relics of the inevitable fights with Prince Rupert, but perhaps the reader is tired of churches. We ask our way to Much Marcle where they make much cider, and as we have lately developed such a thirst for cider it is as well to know where to get it pure and good for another day.

At a farm called the Bounds, another form of the word March or Marcle, which is on the boundary of Gloucestershire, we find immense vats and presses with all modern machinery for the making of apples into cider and pears into perry. Several vats hold five thousand gallons in each, and some are covered with sand or gravel on straw which keeps the contents practically air-tight and yet allows the gases caused by fermentation to escape. Of course we had to sample various blends and brews of liquor, until we felt like Manchester buyers

usually feel when they are having a good time. After all, the genuine fruit was the best, and to see scores of acres of it, in many cases with the trees broken down with the weight of the crop, was again very interesting to one who has tried at Didsbury to grow every sort of apple that was worth the growing. We cannot grow them with anything like the rich colour they have in Herefordshire, nothing to compare to it. Perhaps the best of all apples is the Blenheim Orange. There it is orange and scarlet; with us it is a dull dirty green. Coxey's Orange colours better than it does with us, and King of the Pippins better still. These are noted best fruit, but they are small and dull compared to the cartloads of gorgeous fruit in Herefordshire. Their cider apples were quite unknown to me The famous Foxwhelp we were told was practically extinct, merely a name to talk about. Royal Wilding and Kingston Black were favourites, splendid to look at, but worse than the fabled apples which turn to dust and ashes in the mouth, for they would break the teeth and take the skin off the lips of those who rashly tried to eat them.

From Much Marcle we are directed to Preston Court, where there is a fine specimen of the black and white hall having six gables on one side, the remnant of a moat, and a nice little chapel in the farmyard, all in apple-pie order. The master is from home, so we cannot learn anything about the place, and we travel on for Hereford through miles of hop-yards where in places there are enormous screens bordering the roads and fields to screen the precious crop from blighting winds.

This was another day of difficulty as regards our tea. The superior critic may scoff, as critics have scoffed before, at our troubles to get tea, but nothing can justify the fact that we cycled for many miles, calling at every publichouse we came to and asking to be supplied with tea, and at every house we were refused. At a grand hotel under the sign of some aristocratic arms an impressive female