"SWEET AUBURN" AS IT IS TO-DAY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 189, 10 November 1876, Page 13

" SWEET AUBURN" AS IT IS TO-DAY.

The site of the "Deserted Village" is on the road from Athlone to ■Bauymahon, about six miles from the former town; and as crops ot new " Auburns " aie springing up around in all directions, it is necessary to mention the poet's name in order to be set on the proper .track to "Goldsmith's Auburns," as the Westmeath peasantry call it. ... At a little distance from the entrance to iiissoy, andat the same side of the roac 1 , is the very pool alluded to ty Goldsmith, and the noisy geese are now as ever gabbling over it, and on its margin as I passed. It is bordered by a few stunted hawthorn bushes, having upon them a strange impress of old. Uver against it is a ruinous cottage, the residence of a " wretched matron whose tale of her own happier years assuredly merits a sympathetic listener :

She only left, of all the harmless train, The sad historian of the pensive plain. The fields near her cottage were, up to a recent period, covered with a deep embowering wood ; but all this has been cut away, and now only the discolored stumps remain, as if to heighten the apparent desolateness of the scene. Ascending an incline, which certainly deserves not the name "hill," we come to the cross of the "Three Jolly Pigeons," where the ruins of the alehouse may be seen; also the sycamore on which the signboard of that little inn used to be so invitingly hung in years that are over. Here, too, at the opposite side of the road, grows a later representative of that famous hawthorn bush, which, though no fragment of it now remains where those enviable old people would so often sit and chat, and where those artless loves were told by-rustic lovets of long a°-o, yet Didß tair to bloom in fancy's garden for ever. To the right, a little ott the road, leading north west, are the hoary roofless walls of the once « busy mill." Most of the wheel has been taken away, aoubtless by visitors, each scrap being in some sort as a faded palm branch from one of "the Delphian vales, the Palestines, the Meccas of the mind." The old nether millstone alone is likely to endure for a while beneath the ceaseless agencies of change and decay.— From ' Belgravia.'