NORTH DEVON
105
cunningly mated with the crumbling stucco, the dark interiors within the open doors more quaintly pictorial, than elsewhere; and as I loitered, while the horses rested, in the little cool old timber-steepled, yew-shaded church, betwixt the high-backed manorial pew and the battered tomb of a crusading knight and his lady, and listened to the simple prattle of a blue-eyed old sexton, who showed me where, as a boy, in scantier corduroys, he had scratched his name on the recumbent lady's breast, it seemed to me that this at last was old England indeed, and that in a moment more I should see Sir Roger de Coverley marching up the aisle. Certainly, to give a proper account of it all, I should need nothing less than the pen of Mr. Addison.
1872.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/English_Hours_%28Cambridge%2C_The_Riverside_Press%2C_1905%29_%E2%80%94_illustration_page_105.jpg/220px-English_Hours_%28Cambridge%2C_The_Riverside_Press%2C_1905%29_%E2%80%94_illustration_page_105.jpg)