Hill Country Overlapping at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

Rural Districts. The supreme example is offered by the Cotswolds, a stretch of hill country overlapping Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire, which grew rich on the medieval wool trade and surrounds a number of remarkably beautiful small country towns. Each town has a fine church and a redolence of prosperity—once of merchants, now of tourism and prosperous agriculture. The Cotswolds area is stone country —dry stone walls, stone cottages, splendid stone mansions, all set in hills so contoured and wooded by nature and art that they seem to form one enormous park.

Nearer Paris lies the shrine-like hill town of Vezelay and farther to the west, in the exact geographical center of the country, the sleepy cathedral city of Bourges. In the above list, which I have set down in the belief that mere names, in France, pack a sure punch, there is one interloper. Monte Carlo, of course, is not in France at all, but in the Principality of Monaco, an independent country (of 370 acres!) and a member of the European Travel Commission. As such, it will have separate coverage later, when this alphabetical book reaches the letter M.

Description: Head reddish or reddish-brown; pattern a series of large chocolate or black blotches flanked on each side of body by rows of smaller blotches; ground color above yellowish or light brown; belly yellow checked with black. Reaches length of 63 inches. Essentially ground dweller; found in open country, about outbuildings, in briar patches; in rolling hill country, near marshes and small bodies of water.