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Rh and sow-gelders, carters, dairymaids, and gipsies, and a clergyman whom James Long had hunted "dryfoot to the alehouse with his pack of hounds, to the great grief of the revered divine"—"one of the old red-nosed clergy, orthodox and canonical." "In several cases, over the initials of his dramatis personæ, Aubrey has jotted the names or initials of the real persons he was copying." The scene was to be Christian Malford green, a little east of Draycot Cerne and Kington St. Michael.

But either the bailiffs found him, or he went fishing in the pond where the Chalk Bourn rises. The play was not finished. There were "no better trouts in the kingdom of England," said Aubrey, than in his pond at Naule. And off he went to Draycot or Easton. He hoped that some "public-spirited young Wiltshire man" would polish and complete his "natural remarques." Yet he lived to reach seventy-one, having just published his "Miscellanies," and dedicated them to the Earl of Abingdon. He died at Oxford on his travels in 1697, and was buried there, in St. Mary Magdalene's Church, undistinguished by tablet or inscription.