Dorsetshire, the centre of the "Hardy Country," the home of the Wessex Novels, is a land literally flowing with milk and honey: a land of great dairies, of flowers and bees, of rural industries, where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long, and the kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in towns: a land desirable for its own sweet self, where you may see the beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which I have spoken, and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech. You may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn of every lane. Thatch survives in every village, as nowhere else, and here quaint towns maintain their quaintness at all odds, while elsewhere foolish folk seek to be-as they phrase it-"up to date." It is good, you think, who explore these parts, to be out of date and reckless of all the tiresome worries of modernity.