The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Leisurely Tour in England, by James John Hissey

A LEISURELY
TOUR
IN
ENGLAND

HISSEY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE CHARM OF THE ROAD.

England and Wales.

AN ENGLISH HOLIDAY.

UNTRAVELLED ENGLAND.

OVER FEN AND WOLD.

London to Lincolnshire and Back.

ON SOUTHERN ENGLISH ROADS.

THROUGH TEN ENGLISH COUNTIES.

ACROSS ENGLAND IN A DOG-CART.

London to St. Davids and Back.

A TOUR IN A PHAETON.

Through the Eastern Counties.

A HOLIDAY ON THE ROAD.

Kent, Sussex, and Surrey.

ON THE BOX SEAT.

London to Land's End and Back.

A DRIVE THROUGH ENGLAND.

London to Scotland and Back.

AN OLD-FASHIONED JOURNEY.

With T. HUSON, R.I., R.P.E.

ROUND ABOUT SNOWDON.

A LEISURELY TOUR IN ENGLAND

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

See page [312.]

A MOATED MANOR-HOUSE.

"The place is silent and aware;
It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that is its own affair."

A LEISURELY TOUR
IN ENGLAND

BY

JAMES JOHN HISSEY

AUTHOR OF
'THE CHARM OF THE ROAD,' 'ON THE BOX SEAT,'
'AN ENGLISH HOLIDAY,' 'OVER FEN AND WOLD,' ETC.

WITH THIRTY FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS (AND FOUR SMALLER ONES) FROM DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR ALSO A MAP

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1913

COPYRIGHT

TO
MY DAUGHTER
MRS. HERBERT MALPAS

PREFACE

Stevenson once took a journey with a donkey, which animal gave him much trouble. I took my journey in a reliable little motor-car that happily gave me none. Though I went by car I went leisurely, stopping often by the way, for full well I realise the reward of loitering, and, as all wise wanderers can testify, there is such a thing as profitably loitering, and a joy in it. Had they been of his day Carlyle would probably have declared that motor-cars "are mostly employed for the transport of fools best left at home," at least he said so of railways. With a car, however, you can control the pace, and can stop at your pleasure; it is an excellent servant, though in truth a bad master.

I went "in search of the picturesque" and I found it, also of the unfamiliar in a familiar land. If I came to an interesting place, or happened upon some curious character steeped in the traditions of the countryside, whose speech was perchance racy of the soil, the matter of time did not trouble me. Why should it? The day was mine and the promise of it, my object was not to cover so many miles and make them meaningless by undue haste, but to linger long enough in pleasant places, the more remote the more to my mind, so that they could make their appeal to me and I could gather something of the spirit of them—a something beyond what the eye merely sees.

"Wise men," says Kingsley, "go a-fishing"; they also go a-travelling, and I can imagine no touring ground—I write this having wandered far and wide in foreign lands—more delightful than rural England, away from the ugliness of modern cities and all that has to do with them. By not confining myself to the high-road but by seeking the byway and the lane I got right into the heart of the real, unspoilt country, where pleasant pastoral scenery, time-honoured homes, quiet farmsteads, old coaching inns (I hope I have not talked too much of them), peaceful villages, each with their ancient churches, quaint little market-towns picturesquely unprogressive, and here and there a ruined abbey or crumbling castle, grey with years, gladden the eye of the pilgrim. Places and scenes to be remembered.

Neither speed, by which we miss much, nor reliance on guide-books formed any part of my programme, for, as Sir Arthur Helps says, "in travel it is remarkable how much more pleasure we obtain from unexpected incidents than from deliberate sightseeing." I set forth for Anywhere by any roads, trusting to fortune for what I might see, content to know that I should arrive at a good many places.

One confession, perhaps, I may make. My book was mainly written at odd times and in varying moods during the journey, when the impressions of people I came across, of places and scenes, were fresh upon me. It is a first-hand, unvarnished record of experiences, but little altered or mended since, and I have been minded to leave it so, for the like reason that I generally prefer an artist's rough sketch and the spirit of it to his finished picture—for polish is not always an improvement, sometimes it is but mere gloss.

The route that eventually evolved itself is but roughly indicated in my Sketch Map, for I found it impossible, on a map of so small a scale, to trace all our devious wanderings, or to note more than a few of the many places visited. As to the illustrations, in a few cases where my photographs unfortunately proved failures I have ventured to replace them with my own drawings; for these—they are but mere brush notes—I crave a kind indulgence.

If I missed anything worth seeing on the way, I can only plead with Plato of old that "as it is the commendation of a good huntsman to find game in a wide wood, so it is no imputation if he hath not caught all."

J. J. HISSEY.

Trevin Towers,
Eastbourne.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

A LEISURELY TOUR IN ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

Different methods of travel—The old coaching days—Maps versus guide-books—The fortune of the road—The South Downs—Hilly roads—The price of beauty—The sentimental traveller—A lonely farmstead—Oxen at work—A quaint old-world village.

There are many ways of exploring the country: one may walk, cycle, ride horseback, or drive a horse in some conveyance, go by crawling caravan or speedy motor-car—each to his fancy or opportunity. Perhaps there is no best way of travel. I say this after having sampled all the methods mentioned, excepting caravanning, for I have tramped it knapsack on back, and enjoyed the tramping, through Switzerland, Scotland, the Lake District, Wales, Cornwall, and Devon; I have taken long cycling tours; I have driven in a phaeton and dogcart from one end of our land to another; I have ridden about country on horseback with a pack; I have driven my own motor-car for more miles than I can remember, and without mishap—so I know, or ought to know, something about the subject, but I will not venture to lay down any dictum, for "What's one man's meat is another man's poison." The thing is to see the country, but what is worth seeing cannot be seen in a hurry.

Walking enthusiasts declare that walking is the only way, and certainly the pace that binds the pedestrian permits of leisured observation, almost compels it indeed: therein much virtue lies. Still there are other ways, and the convenience of a conveyance is not to be despised, for there are born wanderers, like myself, who have grown old at the game, and have come to that time of life when they prefer to be comfortably carried than to carry a load. Then there is the further comfort of not being unduly stinted in the matter of luggage, for given a conveyance, even sundry luxuries such as a luncheon-basket, camera, rugs, sketching materials, fishing-tackle (should an opportunity for sport occur), a book or two to while away a possibly dull evening, and a plentiful supply of maps may be taken without inconvenience. To foot it does not enhance the scenic charms of the way.

Stevenson, who was a great walker, confesses: "It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good." I am glad to quote Stevenson in this respect, for I have had it so frequently dinned into me that the only way really to see the country is afoot. Now I went not afoot, but travelled in my reliable little motor-car, conveniently little for exploring narrow lanes and crooked byways; and though I went by car I went leisurely.

Truly there is no poetry about a motor-car; it has not existed long enough to have gained the halo of romance, so to write of a motor tour makes any appeal to sentiment impossible. This is a handicap; for sentiment does count, even in this matter-of-fact world, let wiseacres say what they will.

Possibly our ancestors saw little romance in the stage-coach or postchaise; to them they were commonplace affairs; indeed they often complained bitterly about the former, the misery of the outside seats in stormy weather and in winter time; moreover, the inside passengers were generally sadly cramped for want of room; then the coaches sometimes overturned, and were frequently uncomfortably crowded. We view those days through rose-coloured spectacles—Time is the romancer. I wonder whether our descendants in the far future will ever look back longingly and lovingly to "the good old motoring days"? Granted that many motorists rush through the country gathering but "hurrygraphs" on the way—that is the fault of the man, not the car. It is unfortunate that at the very beginning of the chronicle of my tour I should feel a need, perhaps a fanciful one, to make excuse for the mode of taking it. The car was but a means to an end; let us forget all about it and consider only the journey wherein my pleasure lay.

I had no programme, no previously prepared plan of route to follow, so happily escaped the tiresomeness of keeping or endeavouring to keep to one. All roads are good roads to me, provided they lead through a pleasant country, and so to enjoyment begotten of contentment: "I travel not to go anywhere but to go." In a definite itinerary I find no attraction. Freedom is the essence of a real holiday, and I would be as free to veer about as a weather-vane that the wind plays on, free to change my course at the call of any inviting byway or lane, the beckoning of a beautiful distance, or at any other passing prompting, or even at the unaccountable mood of the moment; and this without any feeling of reproach. As to guide-book compulsion to see this or that, I would have none of it. I took a supply of Bartholomew's Reduced Ordnance Survey Maps with me on a scale of four miles to the inch, covering all England and Wales, and these were all the guides I troubled about: unlike some guides they were reliable, I could do my own romancing. Thus provided I wandered careless of direction or destination; these and the distance done each day were but trivial details unworthy of consideration—the joy of the journey was the thing.

I never knew when I started forth in the morning where the evening would find me, nor had I any concern so long as the needful inn for the night materialised; and if the first inn I came to was not to my liking, with a tireless car, being master of my Fate, I was enabled to drive on to another more to my mind. That is certainly one of the advantages of travelling by machine instead of by muscle.

I trusted, as I travelled on, wholly to the fortune of the road, letting, so to say, the good things come to me, I did not go in search of them—a delightfully simple method of touring, but it served my purpose well and saved much map-consulting and asking of the way, and the vexation of sometimes losing it. My only care was, as far as possible, to find fresh roads to explore and taverns new wherein to take my ease.

Certain motorists there be to whom speed and long distances accomplished alone appeal; these need a whole continent to travel over, whilst a modest portion of old England, with a bit of wild Wales thrown in for the sake of varying the scenery, sufficed me. Humboldt once remarked of a great wanderer that he had "travelled further and seen less than any one he knew." Now I trust to make clear that though I did not travel far, I saw a great deal.

I was prepared for any adventures should Fortune so favour me, but adventures are hardly to be expected in settled lands, beyond, perhaps, the remote possibility of the motor breaking down at nightfall on some lonely moor far from human habitation; but nothing of the kind happened, for my car gave no sort of trouble—not even tyre trouble—from the start to the finish of the journey. But then it was driven at a moderate pace, and carefully. The journey was void of excitement: happily so, for though I have suffered sundry adventures in my life, I realise they are more enjoyable in the telling than in the experiencing.

Says Hazlitt, "One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey." There I am wholly with him, but not when he adds, "I like to go by myself." I am afraid Hazlitt was a selfish man. Then he continues: "I can enjoy society in a room, but out of doors Nature is company enough for me.... Instead of a friend in a postchaise, or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence." As to going alone, surely a sympathetic companion by your side, even though not a word be said at times, only a presence felt, can in no way lessen the joys of a journey? A companion does away with any sense of loneliness that is apt at times to come over the solitary wanderer like a cloud over the bright sunshine; for after all, in spite of certain philosophers, man is a communicative being. A beautiful scene, or an interesting place, doubly appeals to me when I have some one near by to express and share my delight in it. But, in truth, a sympathetic companion is not always to be had. Now it happened that my wife was prevented from taking her place in the car—"Excepto quod non simul esses, caetera laetus," I could only say. No one else was at the moment available; so perforce I had to take my journey companionless or forgo it to an indefinite future. The latter alternative was unthinkable; a lost opportunity is not always recoverable; I trust no future. "Elapsum semel non ipse possit Jupiter reprehendere," said Phaedrus a long while ago, to quote the ancients again, and a truth is a truth for all time.

After all I did not go alone, for I took my faithful fox-terrier with me. A dog is the best substitute for a human companion; indeed, I would prefer to travel with a dog of the right sort to venturing with an untried human companion any day—at least you cannot fall out with a dog by the way. A dog never worries you with senseless prattle; he need never be entertained; he never complains of waiting; his patience is inexhaustible. On the other hand, he is ever ready and only too delighted to accompany you at any moment on a ramble afoot, or he will keep faithful guard over your car should you leave it alone by the wayside; and he will not grumble about his food or his quarters. I took dog-biscuits with me for my terrier in case of need, but generally the crumbs that fell from his master's table sufficed him. A dog is a most unselfish creature; a kind word or a pat perhaps now and then he craves, and how easily and gladly these are bestowed. One cannot ever be dull with a dog as companion; so with my dog I started on my journey. Now, to avoid the too frequent use of the personal and irritating "I," I crave permission at times to employ the less personal "we," even if I have to include the dog and the car to justify that term, or to do so forgetfully without.

It was early one sunshiny morning towards the end of May, with the pleasant month of June to follow and the promise of it, that I mounted my car and was off without more ado. I had carefully packed it overnight to avoid any possible delay, and that nothing needful should be forgotten in the haste of departure. With my holiday only just begun, with the little world of all England before me, free to wander wherever I would, my mind full of anticipated pleasures, I fared forth in the most enviable of moods. From my home at the foot of the South Downs I climbed to their breezy summit, taking the old road that leads westwards over them, having the rolling green downs on one side, and the glittering sea visible, but a little way off, on the other. Here one breathes a lighter, purer air, so that the mere fact of breathing becomes a pleasure.

My journey had a good beginning! By climbing the downs I had raised my horizon and looked down upon the world, not with a sensation of superiority, but with a sensation of relief, being lifted for a time above all its tiresome trivialities and commonplace conventions. I found myself alone with earth, and sky, and sea, rejoicing in my loneliness, and I felt the sense of spaciousness of the wide, bright, overarching sky, of the boundless waters, and of the vast panorama of rounded hills reaching far away into the dim and dreamy distance, where the solid land looked as unsubstantial as a cloud.

Broad and bare to the skies
The great Down-country lies,
Green in the glance of the sun,

Fresh with the clean salt air.

My road led me a little inland, for I avoided the tourist-haunted one that winds over Beachy Head, that grand headland that rises so sheer, white, and commandingly above the sounding sea. Would one could behold it in its ancient seclusion! Such spots demand solitude, or they cease to be impressive. "The fatal gift of fame" has been the headland's undoing, aided by its proximity to a fashionable watering-place, and the crowd it attracts from early morning till the sun is setting. They even sell picture post-cards there and bottled ginger-beer! Need more be said? Yet I recently read an article in a London paper upon "The Pleasant Solitude of Beachy Head." Was it written in Fleet Street, I wonder?

All the roads over the downs are hilly ones; they are for ever either ascending or descending; their gradients are generally fairly severe, and their surfaces none of the best. Now and then you come upon a comparatively level stretch, but not for long. So we soon began a long descent, only to climb steeply again and to find ourselves on a wind-swept height with a tiny flint-built church crowning the topmost ridge of it. Friston church it was marked on our map—an unpretending building, yet not wanting in dignity, and simple dignity is a rare quality, as delightful as it is rare. Even some city-surrounded cathedrals do not attain it. Doubtless its elevated and lonely position gave the humble little fane a certain poetic charm, for it is not only the building but its place in the prospect that affects the observer. Stonehenge in a farm field, away from the wild and open plain that surrounds it, would lose much of its impressiveness; it has lost some of it already by being railed in. A castle in a hollow, as many were built to secure the services of a moat, is not the same to the eye as a castle boldly dominating the landscape from some overhanging crag. Bodiam's ruined Castle, set in a wooded valley, is beautiful but not impressive; on the other hand, Carreg Cennin Castle in South Wales, though inferior in size and much poorer a ruin, is singularly impressive, standing as it does isolated on the top of a perpendicular precipice of rock. That is the sort of castle I pictured to myself and used to draw in fancy when I was a boy.

Facing the primitive church, with our road and a pond between, we noticed, what is fast becoming a thing of the past, an old wooden windmill, its sails hurtling round apace in the brisk breeze. The miller, white with flour dust, gazed lazily at us from out a window of his aged and picturesque mill: the wind was his willing slave doing his work for him and working hard that day, why therefore should he not laze and rejoice? The hum of his mill wheels grinding their best must have been as music to his ears. All winds that blow are good for the miller; the sailor is not so fortunate, but to the miller it matters not from what quarter the breezes come, so long as they come. I have been told by a meteorological authority that the wind average for England is eight hours out of the twenty-four. I should imagine that the winds upon the open downs greatly exceed that, and a good, refreshing, salt savour they bring with them, and so a sentiment of the sea and its mystery.

The wide and restful greenery of the downs appeals to and gratifies the eye. In a less moist climate than ours the downs would be but parched and barren ground: blame our climate as we may, and the frequent rains that the prevailing west winds bring, it is these frequent rains that give our homeland its rich verdure and charming mellowness which so attracts the foreigner from sunnier climes. Beauty demands its price, and considering the wealth of beauty granted us I hardly think we ought greatly to begrudge the price of it.

On the downs the eye is free to rove unchecked over miles and miles of this greenery even to the most distant horizon; that is another delight of them. Their rolling masses, no height being much greater than another, might be likened to some gigantic ocean suddenly arrested in a mighty storm and converted, by some magic, into good dry land, and here and there the white chalk showing might serve for the foam of crested waves arrested also: at least such a fancy came to me as I looked over their sloping sides, their gentle rises and falls, billowy down beyond billowy down in an apparently endless succession. The very green of them, though not translucent, distantly reminded me of the green of the mid-Atlantic rollers raised by a gale that for some time had ceased to blow so that their surface is comparatively smooth and not fretted by wind-driven lines. There is an indescribable vacancy about the downs that suggests the impressive vacancy of the sea, the boundlessness of it. But each man sees things with his own eyes, and to some my fancies may seem far-fetched; they were, but still they pleased me, for I am a sentimental traveller.

From our elevated road, some distance on, the curious little village of West Dean was revealed to us, a huddle of roofs and a tiny fane hidden in a hollow of the hills—"a cup full of beauty." We looked right down upon it and over its grey church tower and over the lichen-laden uneven roofs of its few dwellings—roofs all covered with golden lichen, gloriously golden in the bright sunshine; I have never seen roofs so completely thus covered before, and then I realised what a beautifier, even on a large scale, the lowly lichen can be. The village had the rare look of remoteness, so detached was it from the outer world by the wide and folding downs, so far from rail and frequented road. We determined to visit it when we reached the valley by the long descent which followed and idle there a time.

At the foot of the descent we found a large and lone old-fashioned farmstead surrounded by a colony of flint-built barns and out-houses; the little slothful river Cuckmere seeking its way to the sea, with many windings, ran close by. The grey old farmstead with its weather-stained walls, the tranquil, reedy river below, the bare and silent downs beyond, struck a note of intense quietness. A peacefulness profound brooded over this out-of-the-world spot: it might have been a hundred miles from anywhere. A picture, too, it made, effective in its breadth and simplicity. There we rested for an hour or more, just because it pleased us so to do. We travelled in search of peace and found it in a land

Where little lost Down churches praise

The God who made the hills.

Near to the old farm we noticed a yoke of black, long-horned, but meek-eyed oxen slowly drawing a waggon up the steep slope of the hillside.

The slow, black oxen toiling through the day

Tireless, impassive still,
From dawning dusk and chill

To twilight grey.

You seldom see such a sight nowadays, and only rarely on the South Downs or the lonely Cotswolds. Presently the oxen stopped for the waggon to be loaded, and we took the opportunity of having a chat with their driver, a sunburnt man clad in a faded grey suit, and having the soft speech and courteous manner that so often marks the Sussex folk. "Oxen," said he, "beat horses at work any day on these hills. I would not care to drive horses if I could drive oxen; they are a bit slow perhaps, but not lazy; they don't want so much urging as horses; I never has any trouble with them, I have just to give them a reminder with my stick now and then and that is all; you don't need a whip with oxen." I noticed that the stick he held was a long one of hazel, just a thin stick and nothing more, and I noticed that the yokes were fashioned of wood with a heavy cross-bar at the top, and these joined each pair of oxen together, being kept in position by a slight rounded wooden collar below.[1]

Oxen, the driver explained to me, pull from the top of their necks and not by the collar as horses do; yet on lifting a yoke I saw no signs of worn hair, only a smoothness where the yoke touched. Oxen, I learnt, were broken in to draught work at two years old and kept at it from five to six years, after which they were fattened for the market. Their beef was somewhat tough, as might be expected, and chiefly bought by certain institutions. Oxen, I further learnt, were cheaper to keep than horses, as they were fed mainly on hay, chaff, and roots; whilst horses needed oats. So I travelled and picked up odd bits of information.

Then we sought out West Dean, prepared to tramp there if no road were available, for West Dean we were determined to see. Unexpectedly we discovered a narrow lane that led to it, the downs rising sheer above on either hand, leaving just room for the lane and a little clear-running stream which we followed up to the village.

A quaint village it proved to be, to use a term too often misapplied, one that surely has no counterpart in all the land. Picturesque it could hardly be called; but though I prize both the picturesque and quaint, the quaint pleases me the

Facing the churchyard we discovered a most interesting relic of past times when religion was more to the fore than it is to-day. This was a pre-Reformation priest-house of the fourteenth century or thereabouts, an austere building of thick rough masonry, deep and narrow arched windows, and a great chimney-stack at one end, a building probably erected in this remote spot by the travelling monks who had not to live in it. I have, here and there, come upon an ancient fourteenth or fifteenth-century priest-house, for they have not all been improved away. There is one at Alfriston, another at West Hoathly—both in Sussex,—and another at Muchelney in Somerset, but these are all half-timbered buildings fairly lighted, and have not the solid, gloomy look of the prison-like structure at West Dean, the windows of which were originally probably of horn, or even possibly mere open spaces with shutters.

One would imagine, being so close to the sea with the river conveniently at hand, that West Dean must have its smuggling traditions: those free traders of old would hardly have overlooked so handy a spot; but if such traditions there be, we could glean nothing about them, for we saw not a soul in the place to speak to; the only living thing we observed was a chicken that apparently had lost itself. Never before have I been in a village with such a forgotten look; there the changeful centuries bring no change. Our car stood unnoticed by the side of a tall and broken flint wall that enclosed a weed-grown garden, wherein stood a great, round, and roofless pigeon-cote; not a face at a window did we see. West Dean took no note of our coming or our going. We drove into, and drove out of, a village asleep, and not even the hum of our engines or the sound of our horn awoke it. There brooded over all a sense of silence and solitude like that of the central sea.

CHAPTER II

A quiet valley—The importance of the unimportant—Moated and haunted houses—Romances in stone—A farmhouse holiday—A picture-book village—A matter of Fate—The tomb of Gibbon the historian—A gruesome happening—Upright burials—An interesting church—A curious epitaph.

Leaving West Dean we drove up the narrow and quiet Cuckmere valley, the smooth green hills rising steeply on either side and so preserving its seclusion to this present day. So quiet the valley seemed that the throbbing of our engines sounded reproachfully in our ears, as though a motor-car had no business to disturb its slumbrous tranquillity. We felt like trespassers! A snug and friendly little valley it is, through which the road and river run in close company. The Cuckmere is but a toy river; I should not have called it a river but that it is so marked on my map, and on its banks I saw a man with a gun shooting into the water. He was shooting fish, he said! I have never seen such sport before.

Passing the hamlet of Litlington we caught a glimpse, on the other side of the valley, of ancient Alfriston, a little village that calls itself "the capital of the downs," and its modest flint-built church "the cathedral of the downs." So, by title, the unimportant assumes the rôle of the important. A village becomes a capital, a country church a cathedral, and a stream a river. One might imagine this was the land of Lilliput!

Of Alfriston a halting couplet runs:

Poor parson, poor people,
Sold their bells to repair their steeple.

But that, I take it, was a long while ago—if it ever was, for I have heard similar couplets of many other places; a few may possibly have some foundation in fact, but I doubt the rest, and in some, alas, the word "drunken" is substituted for "poor"! After the Alfriston people had sold their bells, tradition, that unreliable jade, avers that the bell of a ship, wrecked on the coast, was purchased to take the place of the lost peal, and by the side of the ancient pilgrims' hostel in the same village stands a ship's figure-head in the shape of a boldly carved lion, fierce of countenance, said to have come from the same ship that provided the bell; this, as long as the oldest inhabitant can remember—and what memories these oldest inhabitants have—has rejoiced in a coat of brilliant vermilion, hence the local saying, apropos of what I know not, "As red as the Alfriston lion." Such, at least, were the tales told to me, and many were the tales I heard as I travelled on.

Leaving the valley and the lonely downs regretfully behind, we entered upon a level country, and crossing the main Lewes road we proceeded straight forward into a tame land of flat fields. The scenery was featureless and void of interest, but I was in search of a moated house, so the quality of the scenery was a detail. A friend had told me of this house just before I started on the journey, and had kindly given me a written introduction to its owner, who by happy chance I found at home. So, learning from my map that I was passing close to the place, I determined to see it, if possible. Even with the aid of my map I had some difficulty in discovering the object of my search. Claverham, to give the moated home its title, stands within a few hundred yards of the road, yet so hidden by trees that no casual passer-by would dream of its existence. Thus many good things, though close to his way, may be missed by even the keenest observer, unless he has some hint of them and their whereabouts. I had gone this stretch of road once before and with open eyes, and yet had not discovered Claverham.

A moated house is a graphic reminder of old times when every Englishman's house was in reality, not in words, his castle. Early in the seventeenth century Sir Edward Coke laid down the dictum that "the house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress," a dictum that passed into a law proverb, "Jura publica privata domus." In those benighted days there were no land taxers, or sanitary or other inspectors to demand entry into an Englishman's home. What, I wonder, in olden times would the master of his house have said to a sanitary inspector who demanded admission thereto? Perhaps it would not so much have mattered what he would have said as what he would have done to him—with a deep moat so handy.

The very sound of the words "moated" or "haunted house" was as romance to my ears when I was a youth, and the sound has lost little of its glamour and suggestion of mystery since that long ago, for over such ancient homes there always seems to brood an abiding air of mystery. In my search after moated and haunted houses, many a ballad in building, many a romance in stone, seeming more like an artist's or a poet's dream than a happy reality, and many a legended home in remote places have I discovered—for a romantic spot is the mother of legends. In the troublesome days gone by the dwellers in a moated house must have felt a delightful sense of security with the drawbridge up and the outer windows iron-barred. Even to-day, when staying in a moated house, have I felt the sense of security that a moat affords. So much for sentiment.

Claverham disappointed me, though the fault was mine in expecting too much. To cherish an ideal and trusting to find it is to court disillusion, and a seasoned traveller like myself should not have fallen into this error. The unexpected always charms, when it has the power to charm, more than the expected. "Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises," says Shakespeare, whom it is the privilege of all Englishmen to quote. The chief delight of travel lies in the surprise of the unforeseen, and the discoveries we make for ourselves of interesting places and beauty-spots: being unprepared beforehand for such revelations, no ideals have been formed. So the unknown attracts and becomes oftentimes memorable.

HAUNTED!

I always picture a moated house as a building grey with years, perhaps in parts a little ruinous and creeper overgrown, with ivied casements, a bent and mossy or lichen-laden roof, and with oftentimes a ghost thrown in. Such a house without its ghost seems incomplete to me. Now Claverham, excepting for one possibly original chimney and a lichen-laden roof, conformed in no way to my picture, for the house has been so altered and rebuilt that the greater part of it, though not of to-day, is comparatively of yesterday and not of centuries ago. The wide and weedy moat, enclosing nearly an acre of ground, is there as of yore, but the chief interest of the place is in its history. Still Claverham is picturesque: a pleasant, retired, and wholly delightful abode in the summer-time; in the winter—well, it was not winter-time then. Portions of the interior are quaint, especially the black oak-beamed and plastered hall that with its ingle-nook gives one a genuine old-world greeting. The beams of the hall are of the original building, and so, we were told, was the wide ingle-nook of the dining-room; the crane, fire-back, and andirons of this fireplace, though ancient, are doubtless of more recent date.

This is the history of Claverham in brief as told me by its present possessor. The house was originally built in 1307; according to Volume XIV. of the Sussex Archaeological Society, the manor of Claverham "in 12 Edward II. was in the possession of Nicholas de la Beche. This personage appears to be identical with the Sir Nicholas de Beche who, according to a wardrobe account dated 27th March, 1311, participated with Sir Humphery de Littlebury and Sir Thomas le Latimer in the reward of twenty pounds for the singular service of dragging the King out of bed on Easter Monday." So at any rate my visit there unearthed a curious bit of ancient history. The manor shortly afterwards came into the possession of a member of the then famous Fiennes family, a descendant of one of the Norman warriors who had come over with the Conqueror. A successor of his afterwards built Hurstmonceux Castle and went to live there in 1422, but Claverham was retained by the Fiennes until about 1600. My host told me that his father remembered when there was still a drawbridge over the moat; now where the bridge was is an embanked approach to the house, doubtless more convenient, but infinitely less romantic. So, here and there, these picturesque relics of the past disappear. A portion of the building was so old that it tumbled down some few years back. My host considered that the house was never really fortified in the sense of being able to resist a regular siege, but was rather intended to withstand a raid, or a sudden attack by the robber bands which infested the country; the moat, too, served the further useful purpose as a protection against wolves and other wild animals which at the time had free range over the unenclosed and wooded country around. To-day it serves as a fence to keep out straying sheep and cattle from the fields, so that the tree-shaded and pleasant garden it encloses can be enjoyed in as much peace and privacy as though it were walled about; at the same time the moat does not interrupt what view there is.

Leaving Claverham we drove along a narrow lane that ended in a fair main road, and this took us for a space alongside of the wide Laughton Level, over which sea of waving grasses, once mere marshland, is to be had perhaps the best and most comprehensive panorama of the South Downs, ranging as it does almost from Beachy Head to close upon Lewes. There before us they stretched, bare and rounded to the sky, in their long and lordly array of golden greenery fading into grey: miles and miles of glorious greenery as beheld under the summer sunshine, only broken here and there below by the pale-blue shadows of their shallow recesses. From that distance and point of view, the downs that day looked almost mountainous; it was this view that caused Gilbert White to describe the South Downs as "that majestic chain of mountains"—perhaps a somewhat exaggerated description, but serving to show how impressive the downs may appear under certain conditions, for Gilbert White was not given to employ grandiloquent language. It is the impression that a scene makes upon the traveller that profits, not the vulgar record of mere height, for there is a grandeur of form and colour as well as of size, and for grandeur of rolling form I know nothing to compare with the South Downs seen from afar.

Then, rounding a spur of the hills, we descended into ancient and homely Lewes, "sweetly environ'd by the daisied downs": a town, according to Cobbett, of "clean windows and pretty faces" (I am glad that Cobbett found something during his Rural Rides to admire in his own country, for he was generally on the grumble). We left Lewes by a main road leading northwards: hemmed in as the town is by the downs, there was no other road to take except the one to Brighton, and to Brighton we were not minded to go. Presently we struck a byway to our right which brought us to Barcombe, a village of no interest; after this we found ourselves in a tree-bordered lane of the delightful Devon type, and this we followed for several winding miles.

At one spot we dropped down to a sheltered and wooded hollow where we espied a lonely, half-timbered, and rambling farmstead, such as painters put in their pictures—pictures that the wealthy man of taste hangs on the walls of his mansion purely for the pleasure of looking at them, though I am afraid few men realise the subtle charm of such old buildings until an artist has translated it on paper or canvas. They see their beauties through other eyes, for there is an art in seeing and discovering beauty not cultivated by the many. I was tempted to take a photograph of this ancient farmhouse, but could only secure a poor end view owing to the slope of the ground and obstructing trees. It would have made a delightful water-colour sketch, only had I stopped to sketch every pleasing spot by the way, my journey might have been prolonged to the winter. I had no trouble in finding subjects for the brush or camera; I came upon them in endless succession. So does rural England abound in beauty. My trouble was what to select out of the profusion of good things presented to me. I felt like one going through a vast picture-gallery of lovely landscapes, only the landscapes were real and living, and so the more delightful.

A SUSSEX FARMSTEAD.

The old-fashioned, age-mellowed farmsteads built in the spacious days gone by, when every yard of ground and inch of space was not considered, what pleasantly familiar features they form in the landscape, with their suggestion of contentment, and you come upon them everywhere. Familiar, and essentially English, but how unobtrusive they are, they seem like a natural growth and truly to belong to the soil; remove them from the countryside, and the eye, perhaps hardly knowing why, would feel that there was something missing. Times of late years have not been prosperous for the agriculturist, and I noticed during the journey at more than one picturesque and pleasantly situated old farmhouse a board displayed with "Apartments to let" thereon. From a passing glance they appeared very desirable quarters for those who love retirement, quietude, and purely rural surroundings.

"It's an ill wind that blows nobody good." Probably in more prosperous times farmers would not dream of letting lodgings, but now here is an opportunity offering for hard-worked paterfamilias (whose purse is limited, and who is in search of pure air, change of scene, and fresh surroundings for his youngsters) to spend his holiday in the real country far from crowds, where the children are free to wander over the fields, romp in the meadows, climb trees, play at haymaking, go a-blackberrying, a-bird-nesting, or whatever rural doing may at the moment take their fancy, when not intent upon watching the constant, interesting, and varied life about a farmstead.

A holiday in a farmhouse, how delightful and restful is the thought of it to the town-tired man; what a refreshing and complete change it spells from the usually dull and dear seaside apartments, with the everlasting pier, the noisy band, or the inevitable nigger minstrels on the beach by way of insistent entertainment! At a farmhouse of the right and good old-fashioned sort you may obtain fresh fruits and vegetables from the garden, milk direct from the cow, real thick country cream, butter that you may see churned, home-cured bacon and perchance hams, to say nothing of newly-laid eggs, such as are unobtainable in cities. This is no fancy statement; I write from actual experience. The thing is, of course, to find the right sort of farmhouse and the farmer willing to take in lodgers, for though existing they naturally require discovering, or recommending by those who know them. For the busy man this detail of discovery does present a difficulty; to me driving haphazard about the country it presented none, as such desirable quarters, situated in pleasant spots, discovered themselves from time to time as the journey progressed.

Once I tried the experiment of spending a month in a farmhouse with my wife and child, and it proved an unqualified success. In the matter of cost it was the cheapest holiday I ever took, and no holiday has given me more real pleasure, or lingers more delightfully in my memory. The farmhouse in question (I came upon it during a driving tour, and there I stayed instead of touring further) was situated in wild Wales and surrounded by beautiful scenery; there were wide and open moors at the back of it to ramble over, and mountains on the other side to climb, and not far away was a playful, tumbling little river that provided me with trout fishing.

Much for my sport I cannot say,
Though, mind, I like the fun;

There have I been the livelong day
Without extracting one.

Still, it was ever an excuse for a delightful ramble alongside the companionable river, for in the plashing and gurgling of its waters it almost seemed a living thing. At any unoccupied moment I could sally forth with my rod by its rocky banks, just as readily as I could start for a stroll with my stick, though sketching from nature was my favourite pastime when in a less lazy mood. So time never hung heavily.

Still, perhaps a word of caution may be given: however otherwise desirable, farmhouse apartments in a purely agricultural country are apt to prove a disillusion to the elders if they have no resources in themselves, owing to the want of something more exciting to do than to watch the slow movements of farming operations. Pleasant surroundings are an essential, so a hilly country is to be desired; then places of interest in the neighbourhood may be made the excuse for occasional excursions, and there are few neighbourhoods where these may not be found.

The farmer whose apartments I took let them every year, he told me; an artist and his family had taken them after my term was over, and from what I gathered the different lodgers practically paid the farmer's rent—a roundabout way of meeting agricultural depression. Though but a detail, the farmer sold us what little produce of his we consumed at full market value or over, yet this was considerably less than the usual tradesmen's charges, and every little helps. Besides fruit, vegetables, milk, butter, bacon, home-made jams, and countless eggs, we purchased fowls in quantities, and occasionally ducks. On fowls, indeed, we chiefly relied for the table, butcher's meat being difficult to obtain, and, truth to tell, tough when obtained. The fowls were not over-plump, not being especially fattened—or crammed, is it? Barn-door fowls, the farmer called them, as they picked up a good deal of their substance from the grain scattered about the outbuildings and ricks; so their food was varied, consequently their flesh, if there was not much of it, was tender and delicate of flavour.

We had to rely upon ourselves for society, though we did get acquainted with one stranger, an artist, who had taken up his abode at a homely little inn some two miles away—an inn that had its uses in that it provided us with the bottled ale of Bass. We led a self-contained life and gloried in it. Our bread was home-baked, and I still pleasantly remember how excellent that bread was, though it had not the white colour one is accustomed to in the town variety. We had only one baking a week, but the bread kept sweet and palatable for the whole of that time; it did not dry hard on the cut surface as bought bread does; it was made from home-grown wheat ground at a water-mill near by, whose wheel was turned by the little, useful river—there was the romance of it. Great long loaves they were, with a generous allowance of crisp, rocky crust to crumb—loaves to be remembered.

We stepped at once from the door of the house into the country, and that was the charm of it. Our water came direct from the lonely moors above, and was beyond suspicion pure and in superabundant supply; indeed at one end of the large kitchen there was a stone trough for washing purposes, and along this the water ran day and night; no tap was ever turned on—there was no tap to turn. Perhaps I was fortunate in finding such desirable quarters, but on comparing notes with an artist friend, who took farmhouse apartments in Cumberland, I found he fared as well as we did. A change in the method of taking a holiday lends an added zest to it, and those who are tired of expensive hotels, seaside lodgings, or constant travelling, with the everlasting packing and squeezing of the sponge, might do worse than try farmhouse apartments in some pleasant country. If rest be needed I cannot imagine a more restful form of holiday.

Besides being a good cook our farmer's wife was skilled in the making of sundry jams, jellies, ginger-beer, and elderberry wine; of the last she was very proud, and mulled some for us to bring out its full flavour—I did not sample it a second time: such wine maketh the heart sad. One of her concoctions, however, commended itself to me, namely, a home-made kind of liquor that was fresh and pleasant to my palate which she called, curiously enough, "Job's Comforter." Who would have expected such a thing in a remote farmhouse? This is the recipe for the making of it as given to me: "Get a wide-mouthed stone jar and put in it as many good lemons as you can; stick as many cloves as possible into the skin of the lemons, pressing them well in, then place the prepared lemons in the jar and fill up with unsweetened gin; let the lemons remain in the gin for two or three days, after this strain the liquid off, add honey and a little sugar-candy to sweeten according to taste and to give a smoothness to the liquor, then bottle it." I give the recipe exactly as given to me. I had some trouble to obtain it, and should prefer more precise details as to quantities, but these old housewives are jealous of giving their recipes away. I took a bottle of this "Job's Comforter" home with me and friends of mine pronounced it excellent—"as good as Chartreuse" they declared, but perhaps this estimate was owing to the novelty of the thing. Still, it was undoubtedly good.

Resuming our journey we followed the lonely lane for a long way without arriving anywhere, but "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive," and we were in no hurry. Still, the longest lane has ending, and ours ended at a wide, open, elevated space marked Pit Down on the map; this spot, I afterwards discovered, earned its title from the fact that there in pits were hastily buried the victims of the plague that once devastated the villages around, and in one of these villages, Fletching by name, we shortly afterwards found ourselves. A pretty village it proved to be of the picture-book sort, as clean and neat as though it were a Kate Greenaway's drawing materialised. The ancient church stands in precisely the right spot, around which are grouped, as an artist might group them, the many gabled houses of the village; the one thing wanting to perfect the picture was the village green, but "fortune seldom comes with both hands full." Fletching lies well out of the beaten track and is only to be reached by winding lanes, so that I should imagine a motorist is seldom seen there, unless he has fortunately lost his way to the finding of the village. Even then some motorists might not realise their good fortune.

I stopped the car in the shade of one of its attractive houses, when a man approached me, evidently imagining I had come to see the church, and, desiring to be of service, exclaimed, "The rector will be delighted to show you over the church; there are a lot of curious old tombs inside that are well worth seeing. The rectory is just over the way"—pointing to it—"and I know the rector's at home." I explained that I had not come to see the church but had merely driven into the village accidentally. "But you really ought to see it now you are here," he continued; "the rector takes a great interest in it, and is always so pleased to show it to any stranger." Fate had brought me to Fletching, and Fate appeared determined I should see the church. Fate was kinder than I knew. The man stood there watching me, and after his civility I felt it would seem ungracious to disappoint him. So to the rectory I went, though somewhat reluctantly, for it was a fine, out-of-door day, but I did not wish to hurt the man's feelings.

The grey-haired parson received me most cordially; I might have been a welcome guest instead of a stranger seeking a favour, but I have always found that in pleasant places you meet with pleasant people. Pleasant surroundings surely, to a certain extent, influence the temperament of man? They affect me, I know, and strongly. "Delighted to show you over our church," said the parson; "it possesses many features of interest that you might miss if you went alone." So I put myself under his guidance, for who should take a more intelligent interest in, or know more about, a church than its parson? He even appeared very desirous to show it. A parson's life in a village is often a dull one, and possibly the occasional meeting with a sympathetic stranger comes as a welcome relief to his round of monotonous days.

Before entering the building I noticed a little "low-side" or "leper window" on the left of the porch. The purport of these so-called "leper windows," so frequently to be found in country churches, has perplexed many a learned archaeologist, and it seems passing strange to me why a window so usual should be a subject of such mystery. The once generally accepted theory was that they were provided for lepers, that those so unfortunately afflicted might view, from outside the church and safely apart from the congregation, the elevation of the Host, and thus participate, to some extent, in the service. But in the case of Fletching church, and many others, these peculiar windows are so placed that no one could possibly see the altar from them; moreover, as the rector remarked, lepers were never admitted into churchyards. So the leper theory fails. My personal impression is that these windows were never intended for looking into, but for looking out of the building, and for this purpose such a small window sufficed. From the number of leper windows I have inspected, and writing from recollection, I should imagine that the majority of them are suitably placed for watching the congregation entering the church, and so might be of service to the bell-ringers; but that, I take it, would be a secondary consideration and not the main object of them.

On entering Fletching church my attention was called to the Norman arches under the tower showing that the building had been originally Norman. Now, owing to rebuildings and restorations, it is mainly Early English—the Early English of the Victorian era! On the west wall is a curious and well-preserved little brass, doubtless formerly on the floor. The inscription on this, beautifully cut, runs briefly as follows:

Hic jacet Petrus Denot, glover:
Cujus aie ppicietur Deus. Amen.

The brass is manifestly an ancient one, and the absence of a date is notable; there is plenty of space for it. Two gloves, crossed, are shown below. The English word "glover" looks strangely out of place in the midst of the Latin. Presumably the carver of the inscription, though doubtless familiar from frequent usage with the usual Latin employed on the memorials to the dead, its Hic jacets, its Obiits, and the rest that goes between, was in a quandary how to render "glover" in the classic tongue; his limited learning failing him, he boldly inserted it in English. At least I arrived at that conclusion. Who was this Petrus Denot, I wondered? The rector knew his story in part and enlightened me. He was an inhabitant of Fletching, a glover by trade, and was one of the unfortunates who took a part in the Cade rebellion; he was captured and hanged, but his body was recovered by his relations and was buried in the church. I query if that is the whole of the story, for it seems strange that a tradesman of the period, to say nothing of his being hanged for treason, should have the much-sought-for privilege of being buried within the church's hallowed walls, and honoured with a brass besides. Does the brass being dateless point to anything? I fancy that there is more in the simple terse inscription than meets the eye. At one time it appears Fletching was famous for its gloves made from hogs' skins imported from Holland, and it is supposed that the plague was conveyed to the village by these skins, and that brought the industry to an end, and the village nearly too.

During one of the restorations, when the flooring of the church was removed, many skeletons were discovered beneath, all in an upright position—"pointing to Saxon burial," I was told. It may, however, be remembered that Wordsworth in "The White Doe of Rylstone" alludes to bodies in after-Saxon days being so buried in a vault at Bolton Priory:

Pass, pass who will yon chantry door,
And through the chink in the fractured floor
Look down and see a grisly sight:
A vault where the bodies are buried upright!
There, face by face, and hand by hand,
The Claphams and Mauleverers stand.

"Possibly you are aware," exclaimed my parson guide, "that Gibbon the historian rests here in the Sheffield chapel amid the Sheffield family deceased, for the first earl was a great friend of his." I was not aware of the fact, but with Cicero I could say, "Non me pudet fateri nescire quod nesciam." The number of world-famous men is so large, and grows ever larger as the years roll on, that it is quite impossible to remember where but a scant few of the more famous of them were born, or died, or lie buried. What matters it? These details belong to Fate, not to genius; no genius can command them. So we went to the Sheffield chapel, which is approached by a narrow passage; facing this is a plain marble wall impressively devoid of any ornament, but covered with epitaphs to members of the Sheffield family; in the centre of these is one, in Latin, to Gibbon. He alone has the honour of Latin, the rest being in plain English. "Now," said the rector, "I have a gruesome revelation to make. One evening when at her devotions in the church a nurse was startled by a loud report coming from the Sheffield chapel; she fled the building in terror: it afterwards turned out that the coffin in which Gibbon was laid to rest had burst and a new coffin had to be made. But this is not a lively subject; let me call your attention to those stained-glass windows. The glass of these was removed and buried in the churchyard for preservation during the period of the Puritan fury; some years ago it was unearthed and now is in its old place again. So Time brings about its revenge; what one generation would destroy another would preserve, only the glass being much broken, the pieces have got sadly mixed so as to resemble a mosaic, but not an unpleasing mosaic, revealing little of the old design, yet sufficient to show that the windows were to a royal personage, presumably the Duke of Lancaster."

Next a well-preserved piscina was pointed out to me, having a bracket on the top presumably to support an image, "in which respect this piscina is almost, if not quite, unique in England." Then in turn we inspected some of the ancient monuments; reclining on the first altar tomb were two recumbent alabaster effigies side by side, one of a beruffled man in armour and warlike of countenance, the other of his wife. The inscription below runs: "Here lyeth buried the body of Richard Lache. Coming out of his office of High Sheriff for the counties of Sussex and Surrey, having no issue of his body living, he gave all his lands in the county of Sussex unto Catherine his wife, and made her sole executoress of his last will. In regard whereof ... she of her own account caused this monument to be made, and herself living, to be pictured lying by him, as you see." Yet this disconsolate widow consoled herself the next year by marrying the Earl of Nottingham and lies buried elsewhere! Inconstant woman! Another fine altar tomb, though minus inscription, is supposed by the coat of arms remaining on it to be that of Sir Edward Dalyngruge, "who having amassed a large fortune by war, marriage, and court patronage, obtained the royal license to build upon the hereditary estate of his wife the castle of Bodiam." There were also other ancient tombs of lesser interest, one mutilated but apparently to a crusader and his wife; and a thirteenth-century slab with only the matrix of its brass remaining. In the transept I noticed, hung against the wall, two crested helmets, gilt and coloured, the gilding and colours being much age-dimmed, with rusty spurs and gauntlets suspended just below: the crests were those of the Abergavenny family. There were also other features of interest in the church—a penitent's window, a holy water stoup, and at a late restoration I learnt that one of the pillars by the chancel was found to be hollow and to contain the old steps intact leading to the rood-loft, and at the top of the steps an ancient green chasuble was discovered, left there in some haste or for concealment, it may be imagined.

On leaving I asked the rector if he knew of any curious epitaph in the churchyard. Time, alas! has robbed us of many a one, and worse still, to my knowledge, certain men placed "in a little brief authority," not approving of such levity on sacred ground, have deliberately obliterated others. "But," said the rector, "if I cannot show you any quaint epitaph, I can tell you of a singular one I came upon some time ago in ancient St. Mary's churchyard at Eastbourne; it ran, 'A virtuous woman is 5/- to her husband.' This puzzled me at first, then I came to the conclusion that it should read, 'A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband.' Possibly the carver was an illiterate man, and, being apparently short of space, substituted 5/- for crown, deeming them synonymous. But whatever the explanation, that is how the epitaph read."

Fletching church was one of the happy discoveries of the journey; though much restored it is of more than ordinary interest. There are, indeed, but few churches of ancient date that have not something noteworthy to reveal to the traveller; truly they are chapters of history in stone, and some of them are, in a sense, museums. It is well worth a wanderer's while to step aside now and then to inspect carefully and leisurely a country church (carefully, or he may miss much), especially those in remote spots where a want of pence has happily restrained the restorer's hand: blessed be their poverty, I say, for owing to it only needful reparation has been done, so ancient tombs and brasses have remained undisturbed, and the medieval craftsman's handiwork has not been improved away, to the joy of every lover of the never-returning and picturesque past.

CHAPTER III

An old coaching inn—The resurrection of the road—Far from anywhere—The charm of the unexpected—A historic milestone—"Mine host" of past days—Our port-wine drinking ancestors—The lure of the lane—Village life—Miniature effigy of a knight—The tomb of "the good Archbishop Leighton"—A church clerk's story.

Leaving Fletching by a leafy lane, we shortly came to a grass-margined highway, and where the lane and highway met, stood, somewhat back from the road, a lonely old inn—"The Sheffield Arms" to wit—a well-preserved example of a modest country hostelry of the easy-going Georgian era; one that externally shows no signs of alteration since it first was built, and few are the inns of the period that have not suffered some change during those changeful years. As our posting and coach-travelling forefathers saw "The Sheffield Arms" with its long range of stabling on one side, so it looks to-day, only a little more time-toned and weather-stained, with less life about it and, what life there is, less picturesque.

There was no other building in sight on the long, straight, but undulating stretch of tree-bordered road fronting the inn, excepting one or two lowly cottages half hidden in woods, so out of direct observation that they did not lessen the impression of loneliness and the illusion of remoteness that the place gave. "Miles from Anywhere. No Hurry," is the legend displayed on the gable of another lonely inn at Upware in the Fens; it might as well be written on the signboard of "The Sheffield Arms."

An ancient coaching hostelry of some pretence, that has seen better days and other ways, that has not been modernised, standing forlorn by the roadside, but still appearing too proud to mourn its long-lost prosperity, always makes its appeal to me, for it strikes a pathetic note. I do not need the building to be picturesque, though I would prefer it thus, so long as it be not too much decayed, only that it possess the glamour of age, has entertained travellers of the long ago, and so made its little history. Then I humour my fancy. Many an old inn of this kind has a sort of magnetic attraction for the few who indulge in that despised article, sentiment: Stevenson confessed that he could never get over his hankering after a room in a wayside tavern in which to start his tale. There is romance about a lonely and once flourishing inn, however plain that inn may be—romance that clings to it as surely as ivy clings to a crumbling ruin. I feel that, in the days gone by, some eventful happening only waiting to be revealed must have taken place within the walls of such a one, some romance unrecorded yet. For real romance lingered long into the coaching age, but steam and electricity have killed it. Now

Romance beside his unstrung lute,
Lies stricken mute.

Had "The Sheffield Arms" a tale to tell? To me it looked as though it had, but then it must be remembered the poetry of a place lies as much in the eyes of the beholder as in the place itself; what is a romance in building to one is but bricks and mortar to another. We do not all see alike; a Turner, a David Cox, a Constable would each render the same landscape differently. Once when admiring an old ivy-covered Tudor manor-house I ventured to remark to a native on the beauty of it; he scornfully rejoined, "I see nought in it, it wants pulling down." The eye is but a lens; it is the mind that really sees and interprets.

"The Sheffield Arms" is well retired from the highway by a wide space of grassy ground whereon grows a flourishing clump of trees; on the roadside of this clump stands a large, two-pillared, crossed-top signpost; from this depends a swinging sign, in the good old-fashioned way as an inn-sign should—a sign that boldly proclaims the business of the house, so that even the rushing motorist could hardly pass it unheeded by. Without the needful sign one would hardly guess that the shy building was an inn, so little otherwise does it assert its purpose—and modesty becomes even a building!

There I pulled up beneath the welcome shade of the trees, sought the cool interior of the hostel and called for a glass of ale, for the day was hot, and mortal man is sometimes thirsty. The ale was good, and brought to mind the poet's query:

Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?

Why, to provide good ale, of course, such as I sampled there that day. Then I got a-chatting with the landlord in hopes of gleaning something of the old inn's past story. I found much civility, but to my disappointment the landlord (whose name of Weller, by the way, was a reminder of Dickens) had scant information of the kind I sought. Truly he said it once had been a coaching house: I could have told him that.

OLD COACHING HOSTELRY, SHEFFIELD PARK, SUSSEX.

AN ANGLER'S MODEST INN.

The inn, I imagine, after the coming of the railway suffered from long neglect, left stranded high and dry, as it was, on a travel-forsaken road, its profitable posting and coaching custom gone, and with little else to depend upon: how it existed at all during that stagnant period is a wonder. Who would ever then have dreamt of the resurrection of the road that the motor-car has brought about? How the landlords of the half-forsaken country inns must have rubbed their hands with glee to find custom, and profitable custom too, come again their way. It was a miracle; so they refurbished their ancient houses and blessed the car that others cursed. In this respect, at any rate, the motor has done good service, for a quiet country inn is a boon to the traveller who does not always care to seek his rest in crowded noisy towns. There was a long time, after the coaches had disappeared, when it was the rarest thing to find a decent rural inn, and the best of these existed for the sake of fishermen; they were unfortunately few, but mostly excellent, for the fisherman loves good cheer—so does his fellow-sportsman the motorist.

At the first glance the interior of the ancient hostelry did not appear inviting. I found my way into a large, cheerless apartment, erst, I imagined, the coffee-room; truly there were flowers on the table, and a door stood open wide on to a little garden where sweet-scented roses grew whose perfume was wafted into the chamber, but there was no carpet on the floor, and bare boards, though clean and stained a warm hue, are noisy to the tread and comfortless to the eye. I was not impressed, for though one despises luxury, one looks for comfort. Then I jokingly asked the maid, who put in a sudden appearance on the scene, if they ever had any visitors stopping there: thought I, it is a needless query. To my surprise she replied, "We often have motoring parties for the night, and sometimes they stay a day or two; would you like to see our rooms?" I thought I would; I expected to find musty chambers, four-poster beds, and forbidding antiquated furniture, but I found bedrooms scrupulously clean, neat, and simply but sufficiently furnished; I have slept in rooms less comfortable and less clean at expensive town hotels. There was, too, a large but cosy sitting-room supplied with really easy chairs, and—who would have thought it?—a good bathroom! Upstairs the old inn was clean and comfortable, and the not-too-exacting traveller might take his ease there with much content: indeed I almost wished I had been belated and compelled to do so.

It is always a delight to me to stay at a real old-fashioned country inn, far from anywhere: I love the peace of it. The country is as tranquil as ever, but the towns are, alas! more noisy. Would Dr. Johnson care to "walk down" his beloved Fleet Street to-day, I wonder, with all the twentieth-century bustle of it? De Quincey, too, dearly loved the quiet country inn; writing in 1802, of a walking tour he took, he remarks, "Happier life I cannot imagine than this vagrancy ... and towards evening a courteous welcome in a rustic inn. It has often struck me that a world-wearied man, who sought for the peace of monasteries separated from their gloomy captivity—peace and silence such as theirs combined with the large liberty of nature—could not do better than revolve amongst these modest inns."

At the rear of "The Sheffield Arms" the country looked inviting with its green meadows and big branching trees, and noticing a footpath I was tempted to take a stroll. I had not wandered far when to my surprise I came upon a deep, rock-girt, and shady glen of much charm; at the head of this I caught a glimpse of a large still sheet of silvery water, a lake in miniature, for it was perhaps a quarter of a mile in length or more, of generous width also, and from its sides rose, steeply and abruptly, hills, wooded to the skyline—wooded hills that doubled themselves on its mirror-like surface. I have seldom come so suddenly upon so lovely a spot without a hint of what was to be revealed; in truth the scenery gave no suggestion of this, and, as a rule, Sussex lacks the enlivening presence of water. There was a joy in the discovery of that beauty-spot; nothing more delicious of the kind have I ever seen.

Good things that come of course far less do please
Than those that come by sweet contingencies.

Possibly this sheet of water was artificial, though it had purely a natural look, for it may have been one of the numerous "hammer-ponds" constructed long ago for the service of an iron mill or mills in the now almost forgotten days when Sussex was the Black Country of England, when the present peaceful and pastoral land, as Camden says, "resounded with the noise of busy hammer-mills beating upon the iron," and its pure air was polluted with the smoke of many furnaces and forges of which Sheffield possessed its share. Sussex wood-smelted iron was reckoned the toughest in the world, and iron ore still abounds in the county; it was the failure of fuel for smelting, owing to the exhaustion of the forests and the near proximity of iron and coal in the North, that caused the decay of the extensive Sussex iron industry, not the lack of ore—a fortunate happening as far as the beauty of the land is concerned. Reminders of the period may be found in the many place-names on the map, such as "Steelforgeland," "Furnace Farm," "Cinder Hill," "Hammerfield," and numerous others of a similar nature. Those ancient iron-masters have left their gracious mark in the land by the many beautiful homes, standing yet, that they built for their convenience and enjoyment in the days of their prosperity: they built not only houses, they built pictures in stone, in brick, in half-timber, delightful to look upon; perhaps "they built better than they knew." Amongst the many in half-timber Middle House at Mayfield is a good example, and of those in stone Batemans, near Burwash, the home of Rudyard Kipling, is another.

At the end of the lakelet I discovered a picturesque water-mill—grey and old, with a weatherboard upper story, and a red-tiled, lichen-laden, uneven roof, silvery and golden—its dark green wheel revolving round in a leisurely fashion to the droning of the ancient machinery within, and the quiet splash of water without. A ready-made picture awaiting the artist to paint it, if he has not already done so. Somehow the sounds of water and wind-driven machinery seem to me to be different in quality to that of steam-driven machinery with its insistent noise: water and wind are natural powers, and both water-mills and windmills with their adjuncts are picturesque objects to the eye, but I know no steam-mill that is not ugly. In the days before steam became the almost universal power, and the modern builder and engineer had not disfigured the country with their assertive erections, how doubly beautiful England must have been! Would that photography had been invented ages ago, then we might possibly have had photographs of Elizabethan England preserved to us, so that we might better judge of its picturesqueness than by descriptions and drawings not always to be trusted.

I know of no other pleasanter stretch of highway in all England than those few miles on either hand of "The Sheffield Arms"; on both sides of it are spacious grassy margins left to nature, and they extend as far as the eye can see, and the sum of them would come to a considerable acreage. On these wide wastes grow big oaks and other trees; especially noticeable are numerous clumps of Scotch firs that, with their tall red trunks and twisted branches high above, give quite a character to the roadscape, if I may employ so odd a term; besides which brambles, heather, bracken, gorse, and other wild growing things flourish on them at their own sweet will. An ideal spot for a wayside picnic, where one might choose a secluded nook near to the road, yet hidden from it. Here at least no "hungry nobility have swallowed up all the land except the King's Highway." There was not a soul in sight; the vacant road impressed me with the same sense of loneliness as does a house deserted, for I looked for life and found none.

On a slight rise, a little away from the road and not far from the inn, I espied a tall, shapely, solitary stone pillar, weather-stained and worn, backed by a tangle of greenery. This aroused my curiosity, so off I set to solve its purport—and discovered a glorified milestone, manifestly erected in days somewhat remote; the lettering on it was, in parts, wasted away and so difficult to decipher, but I managed to make out certain of the names and figures, and this is what I noted:

There were further inscriptions, but these were all I copied. Brighton being given as Brighthelmstone shows how far back the stone was placed there—those were the days when people directed their letters "Brighthelmstone, near Lewes." I learnt afterwards that this milestone was erected by a former Earl Sheffield in order to settle the frequent disputes that arose with the postboys as to distances to his park and the inn. "Private travellers," as those who posted about country were called, had need of well-filled purses, for in addition to the charge for posting that ranged, according to Leigh's Road Book (sixth edition of 1837), from 1s. to 1s. 9d. per mile, the postillion expected and demanded a further 3d. a mile for himself, and more if he could extort it; besides which the traveller frequently felt under the moral compunction "to take something for the good of the house" during the delay of changing horses.

On the arrival and departure of the postchaise the old-fashioned landlord was always in polite evidence, willing to drink the traveller's health at the traveller's expense—it was the custom of the age. What constitutions the men of those days must have had, whether of high or low degree! Men then there were who could drink their two, or even three, bottles of port at night, and rise the next morning apparently none the worse for it. When I was a youth I visited a country squire, one of the last of the old race, and I well remember that after dinner he drank his two bottles of port, excepting a glass that was given to me; at the finish he was "as sober as a judge," and the next morning, early, he was out with the hounds.

Leaving the old inn we took a narrow lane opposite to it, for it had a pleasant look; the highway too was pleasant enough, but we thought the lane the more likely to lead to some out-of-the-way spot and have more picturesque possibilities: the highways serve the towns, the byways the villages and the countryside, so always take to a lane when you can if you desire to discover the secreted beauty of the land. Our lane led us through a green and old-world country with no hint of modern ugliness or aught but tranquillity about it, a tranquillity that hardly seemed of our bustling day. The lane was long, but not too long for us, and very winding; possibly our lanes follow the old primitive tracks of past days when the early inhabitants, to avoid a swamp, soft ground, or a wood, simply deviated this way and that in search of firmer footing; even, it may be, these early inhabitants followed on the earlier track of wild animals. Small wonder our lanes are often so wandering—delightfully wandering, for therein lies their special charm: who can tell what a lane may do, or what surprise each bend of it may have in store for the traveller? Then a crooked lane controls the pace, you cannot go fast on it, so time is compulsorily afforded to see and absorb all that is worth seeing; the lane is for the loiterer, though few there be who care to loiter nowadays, so the lane is almost forsaken except by country folk and rural lovers. Some one somewhere says, who or where I cannot now remember, nor am I sure if I have the quotation right, but this is the drift of it, "The lane is a work of genius, the highway that of the engineer." The lane is to the highway as old wine is to new; there is a finer flavour about it, a rarer charm; it leads to half-forgotten places and quiet scenes—

Where the wheels of Life swing slow,
And over all there broods the peace

Of centuries ago.

At last, after many windings and some climbings, our lane brought us to the remote and pleasant village of Horsted Keynes, set on a hill and surrounded by woods. If one goes in search of these out-of-the-way spots they are apt to escape one; it is the good fortune of the true wanderer to discover them—that is the reward of desultory travel. Stopping the car in the wide village street, a goodly portion of the youthful population promptly surrounded it. "A motor-car, a motor-car," I heard them call out to each other, as though the sight of one was somewhat rare; perhaps but few motorists find, or lose, their way there. To travel and escape other cars and the morning paper is a feat even in rural England. Then apropos of nothing one of the boys explained, "That's the way to the church, down that narrow road." "I did not ask the way to the church," I responded; "why did you point it out?" "Well, I thought as how you came to see it; there's nothing else to see here." There was not, except one or two rather pretty cottages.

There before us, a little down a narrow road, stood the ancient church with its tall shingle steeple, curiously slight. I strolled up to the silent fane of Sunday devotion for the sake of a walk and to get a better glimpse of the old-fashioned cottages on the way, each with its little garden gay with flowers. Then I glanced inside the church. I had not been there more than a minute or two before the clerk made his appearance, somewhat out of breath in his haste to discover me before I departed. "I saw as how you were a stranger," said he, "and thought perhaps you would like me to show you over the church." So are strangers' movements noted in quiet places. In many an out-of-the-world village the coming of a stranger arouses an astonishing amount of interest; his coming, his movements, his business, his going, are subjects of discussion and watching. How uneventful and unexciting must the lives of the sleepy villagers be that so small a matter should claim their special attention; little wonder that the younger generation among them seeks the town as a relief from the dull monotony of its existence. How to make village life attractive is the problem, and a pretty stiff problem too. Village halls and reading-rooms do not solve it—the average villager scorns them; he, or she, much prefers to idle out-of-doors doing nothing, contentedly or discontentedly, varied by an occasional visit to the public-house. It is not an ideal existence. What the villager needs is a wider interest in life. "Back to the land" is a vain cry till country life is made less dull and more desirable; but if the country in the winter-time is dull to some, is not the town also dreary to others with its yellow fogs and muddy streets? I am writing of the poor man who throngs the town where labour is over-supplied and leaves the country where it is required. So the shires are deserted and the slums crowded. I am no politician, I detest politics as I do the devil—if they are not one and the same thing—but from what I have seen and heard, from the many talks I have had with the countryman lowest down in the social scale, I do feel that only the pride of possession of his freehold cottage with a little garden attached, or some small holding, will ever attract him back from the town to the land. A garden to tend keeps a man's idle hours pleasantly employed, and keeps him too away from the public-house. In the same way I still more strongly feel that the loss of the sturdy yeoman farmer, tilling his own little freehold, on which son succeeded father in the good old days, is a disaster to the country. To do "yeoman's service" had a pregnant meaning once; now it has none, for the yeoman has gone, gone to other lands to forward their prosperity. He was foremost in the fight on many a hard-fought field: he it was who helped to turn the scale at Crecy and Agincourt, and his reward has been to be improved (!) out of existence.

But I have forgotten I was with the clerk in the church. I am afraid that at first I rather resented his intrusion, but after all he turned out an obliging fellow, amusing too without the thought of such a thing, so I forgave him. "It's an interesting old church," he exclaimed. How familiar I am with that phrase, so often have I heard it; it is the stock phrase of most clerks by which he introduces himself to you, with the inevitable tip in view. But there he was, not to be disregarded, and with a smile on his face; he might have looked more serious, I thought, for I fancy he was sexton too. I don't know why, but his smile annoyed me; however, I let him have his way. "It's a very old church," he went on, "but it has been restored." "Do you know, I've already discovered that," I retorted. "'Deed, sir, then I suppose you be one of those learned antiquated gentlemen who understands architecture. Now I think I can show you something that will interest you. I likes to meet learned antiquities; I'm a bit of an antiquity myself." He was!

Then he led the way to the chancel, and there he pointed out to me on the north wall under a small canopied recess the miniature effigy of a cross-legged Knight-Templar, with his foot resting on the usual lion in miniature too—a very curious and interesting monument, the like of which I have not seen before; the recumbent figure is beautifully carved and in a good state of preservation. But why so brave and bold a knight—it is a matter of faith with me that those knights of old were all both brave and bold—should have such a miniature monument I could not conceive. It perplexed even the learned clerk to account for this strange departure from the usual life-sized effigies of warriors who are supposed to sleep peacefully below their "stone pictures." It could not have been want of pence, for the carving was too well done; it could hardly have been want of space. Why, then? There was, unfortunately, no inscription on the monument, so what the knight's name was, or what daring deeds he may have done, or when he died, I cannot say, but I guessed that the tomb was of about the time of Edward I. Then the clerk told me the tale of a learned "antiquity" who had come from afar especially to inspect this monument (so the fame of it has spread abroad, though I had never heard of it before), and this learned authority had declared, after carefully examining the belt of the effigy, that the date of the monument was 1227. How he could arrive at so exact a date I could not imagine, for after hearing this statement I critically examined the belt but could discover no figures thereon; and the carving in itself is surely not enough to go by. Still my guide stuck to his story.

There were other things of minor interest the clerk pointed out to me—the headless brass to a woman, once on the floor but now on the wall; an old stone slab with a finely carved and raised cross, without inscription, also built into the wall; and a number of nail holes in the fine oak roof, showing where laths had at one period been nailed to it to support a plaster ceiling! But I discovered for myself a mural tablet on the chancel wall to a Mrs. Sapphira Lightmaker, "a devout woman and a mother in Israel, widow indeed, who notwithstanding sollicitations to a 2nd marriage, lived to 44 years." What was the import of this? Are unsought-for "sollicitations to a 2nd marriage" likely to shorten life?

Then the clerk asked if I knew that "the good Archbishop Leighton is buried here?" I was not aware of it; the clerk knew more than I did, and the fact appeared to please him. "I thought perhaps I could tell you something you didn't know," said he. I felt complimented, for his remark showed that in his opinion I possibly was not wholly ignorant about other things. "Where is his tomb?" I asked. "Out in the churchyard," was the reply; "but it was not always out in the cold; at one time the ground was covered by a chapel, but the chapel either fell or was pulled down." Wherever you go in England you come upon history: at Fletching I came upon the tomb of Gibbon; here, on that of Archbishop Leighton, and both in remote out-of-the-world villages reached only by devious lanes.

We went without to see the tomb, a portion of the epitaph on which runs, "In an age of religious strife he adorned the doctrine of God." But the saintly Archbishop has a second, and an older, monument (it is not often, indeed I do not remember such a thing before, that one finds two monuments of different ages close together to the same person). The older monument is in the shape of a slab set against the chancel wall, and bears the following Latin inscription:

Depositum
Roberti Leightvn
Archiepiscopi Glasguensis
Apud Scotas
Qui Obij xxv. die Junij
Anno Dmi 1684.
Aetatis suae 74.

"Do you know," exclaimed the clerk, "I was showing this monument to an old lady one day who appeared to take a great interest in it, for she told me she had been recently reading about the Archbishop; then suddenly she said, 'I suppose you knew him well, being the clerk here. Do tell me exactly what he was like.' Now that's a true story." "What reply did you make?" queried I. "'Madam,' I said, 'do I really look over two hundred years old?'"

It may be remembered that the Archbishop used often to say that he thought "an inn the fittest place to die in, it looking like a pilgrim going home, to whom the whole world was an inn, and who was weary of the noise and the confusion of it." And he had his wish, for he died at the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, London. Curiously enough, Cicero, centuries before, expressed himself much in the same way, for thus he wrote: "Ex vita discedo, tanquam ex hospitio, non tanquam ex domo."

As I was leaving, the clerk told me that about a mile away, in a wild and wooded country, was Broadhurst, where the good Archbishop spent the last years of his life. "It's a funny tumble-down old building," he said, "and it used to have a moat right round it, but that's filled up; the road to it is very rough and rutty; a farmer has it now." I know not how it was, but though an ancient and picturesque home has an unfailing attraction for me, yet in this case I somehow neglected going just that little out of my way to see what I understood to be one. Truly "a very rough and rutty road" is not good for tyres, or car, but I could have walked it: why this did not occur to me at the time now passes my comprehension; it must have been a temporary lapse of sanity. Even geniuses have such lapses, for it is recorded of Sir Isaac Newton that he cut two holes in his study door, a large and a small one, for a favourite cat and her kitten to enter by! As to Broadhurst, I can only console myself that possibly (as Dr. Johnson once remarked of a place) "it is worth seeing, but not going to see."

CHAPTER IV

Dane Hill—Epitaphs—A wild bit of country—Ashdown Forest—Exploring—The use of maps—Curious inn signs—A Tudor home—The Devil's door—A medieval priest and guest house—Old-fashioned flowers—An ancient interior—Curious carvings—Roads in the old times—The window and hearth tax.

Out of Horsted Keynes we followed a friendly lane that quickly dipped down into a deep and wooded valley and then rose steeply to Dane Hill, an elevated spot that probably derives its name from an early Danish camp, or from some forgotten battle taking place there during the Danish occupation; its commanding situation suggests it may have been a fortified post. Place-names, preserved through generations, often mark spots where some far-off and unrecorded event has taken place, and I am inclined to think Dane Hill is one of these. I hunted through several volumes of general and local history, but failed to find any mention of a battle there; sometimes, however, tradition is founded on fact, though one cannot accept any tradition as trustworthy; still, where probability and tradition go hand in hand, I am inclined to give ear to tradition. Some day perhaps some Archaeological Society may go digging about Dane Hill and make discoveries.

Dane Hill is crowned by a fine, large church, not ancient, nor yet quite of recent days, for its stones have grown grey with years, however many or few those years may be. Access is afforded to the churchyard by some steps, and at the side of these stands a modern, tall-pillared, canopied cross; the carving and shaft of this are beautifully neat, a careful copy of old work, yet without even a hint of its spirit or vigour, it being all scraped and smoothed to a meaningless finish, as though any mark of handiwork was a thing to be ashamed of; the old monkish craftsmen knew their art better, for it is the human touch revealed upon it that gives meaning to the meaningless stone. There is no soul behind the modern workman's tool: how can we expect it when for long years we have been making a human machine of him? Look at his lifeless productions, however painstakingly carved, and compare them with the grotesque gargoyles that verily seem to breathe and to struggle of the medieval sculptor, or any other like work of his hands; the latter too was a creator, not a mere copyist. His creatures resemble nothing on earth or in water that has been as far as I know, yet they look like things that could live.

Somehow the large churchyard looked strange to me, and for the moment I could not reason why; then suddenly I realised it was because there was not a gravestone in it, not even a grass-grown mound: did the people of the small hamlet never die? The harvest gathered in God's acre is generally so plentiful. Then I solved the mystery; on the opposite side of the road I discovered a little cemetery hidden by trees and where the gravestones were many, each with its loving tribute to the underlying dead. To judge by the tombstone inscriptions in our churchyards, what paragons of perfection lie sleeping there, what saintly virtues they possessed! Would that I had met them in the flesh! Why always of yesterday and not of to-day? Small wonder that a little girl who had been reading similar eulogies asked her father, "Where are all the bad people buried?" Only once have I come upon an epitaph that might possibly bear an unkind interpretation, and this read, "He was ...," leaving the rest to be filled in by the imagination. Solon, the great Athenian ruler, according to Plutarch, "laid down a justly commended law that no man must speak ill of the dead," and wisely ordered, for the dead cannot defend themselves nor can have any say upon what is inscribed above their dust, excepting in those few instances when the living have written their own epitaphs, not always laudatory by the way, and one cannot but admire their candour. For example, there is the much-quoted one that Dr. Lloyd, a dean of St. Asaph (deceased 1663), wrote for himself, and it will bear quoting again:

This is the epitaph
Of the Dean of St. Asaph,
Who, by keeping a table
Better than he was able,
Ran much into debt
Which is not paid yet.

At Dane Hill we came upon a good main road that led us to a wild, open upland reaching far on either hand, a delightful bit of unsophisticated nature where the land is poor as land well can be, so poor that according to a local expression "it would make a crow cry to fly over it," yet beautiful in colour to look upon. A glorious stretch of wide and wild country bare to the sky and swept by all the winds that blow, and the absence of any bounding hedges or fences left the eye at liberty to rove over it unchecked to the furthermost horizon of distant hills "rolling in the blue," and to the fir-fringed heights ahead of Ashdown Forest darkly outlined against the sky. Glorious in colour with its masses of purple heather and golden gorse, and sweet was the odour of the gorse that came wafted to us on the soft west wind. All England is not tamed or cultivated, and I am thankful, in a scenic sense, that some portions of it, such as the moors and heaths, still resist the dominion of man, as they have done for ages past. Not so Cobbett, for thus he writes apparently of this very spot in his Rural Rides: "You cross Ashdown Forest ... verily the most villainously ugly spot I ever saw in England ... getting, if possible, uglier and uglier all the way, till at last you see some rising spots which instead of trees present you with some ragged, hideous rocks." But no land was beautiful in Cobbett's view, I take it, unless it would grow good wheat; he notices the rocks, "hideous" in his eyes, though romantic in others, but has not a word for the glowing gorse or purple heather that I presumed flourished there in his day, as now. What was gorse or heather or their rich colours to him? You cannot eat gorse or heather; mere beauty he considered not, but a well-grown field of turnips sent him into raptures. Ashdown Forest climbing the hillside, though it only grows trees, is to me with its green glades, its groves of pine and their dim pillared recesses, as delightfully shady and as silent a retreat as the heart of man could desire, yet Cobbett deems it a "most villainously ugly spot." Let no one trust Cobbett's Rural Rides as a touring guide. Nor by his own showing does he appear to have been a very gracious traveller, for thus he writes of one inn where he stopped the night and left the next morning early: "By making a great stir in rousing waiters and boots and maids, and leaving behind me the name of a 'noisy troublesome fellow,' I got clear." I read Cobbett's Rural Rides in the hopes of gaining some information about scenery—and the only information I could gain was about the qualities, good or bad, of agricultural land. Now the title Rural Rides suggests pleasant rovings, not lectures upon land and upon politics.

We drove on to a spot right on the top of a hill overlooking Ashdown Forest, and there the road began a long and gradual descent, out of the sunshine into the green gloom of the woods. This descent we should have taken had we not espied a lonely byway to our left that appeared to keep on the high and open ground, so we chose the sunshine, the breezy upland, and the byway: a solitary signpost pointed down this with "West Hoathly" boldly displayed on its extended arm. Now West Hoathly was but a name to us, but to West Hoathly we would go; we might make discoveries there—which we did.

Writing of signposts reminds me that when touring in Somerset some years ago I asked my way of a man by the roadside, and he said to me, "Go straight on to the next parson; he will direct you." "The next parson," I exclaimed in astonishment; "whatever do you mean? I may not meet a parson for miles, or at all." "I see you don't understand," was the reply, "but us calls direction-posts parsons in these parts." "How is that?" I queried. "Well, I don't exactly know why, but us do." As I could glean nothing further I sought information elsewhere, and was fortunate enough to find a man who explained to me that "Some folks hereabouts calls direction-posts parsons, because they point the right way but don't go it. It's quite an old joke in these parts;" and he grinned as he repeated the joke to me. Old though it was I had not heard it before, though a Somerset clergyman to whom I told the story often had.

A glance at our map showed that the byway would probably take us into a remote corner of the land, far from travelled ways and into a country of woods and wildness, for beyond West Hoathly, marked on the map, were Worth, Tilgate, and St. Leonard's forests, close upon each other and altogether of considerable extent, with narrow lanes winding through and round about them. There surely we should be well out of the beaten track. That is one profitable use and pleasure of a map, to trace, now and then, a rough course upon it remote from town or rail. Many a delightful hour have I spent with a map before me, travelling in imagination by its aid when the winter storms and snow forbade road wandering for pleasure: so I would go up hill and down dale, now following the course of a river for miles, now coming to a ferry across it, now to a ford, now to a mill, now to a bridge by which I reached the other side and climbed up to a wild moorland solitude; then I would descend to the lowlands and make my way by somnolent villages, by shady woods and pleasant parks; then I would come to a ruined abbey, anon to an ancient castle, then to an old battlefield, a prehistoric camp, and occasionally to a Druids' circle, and all this whilst seated comfortably in my arm-chair before a blazing log fire. I think it was Sir Thomas Browne who said, though I am not quite sure of my authority, that to travel with a book was "the pleasantest way of all of travelling"; but I prefer a map, then in fancy I can go where I like, not where others take me. To show how useful a map may be to the discovering of interesting places that have not, generally, found their way into a guide-book, and to specialise in moated houses, I have now before me the Ordnance Survey Sheet of Stratford-on-Avon, No. 200, covering no great breadth of country, and I have just counted nine moated houses marked upon it, or "moats" at any rate; and these are they, being at, or close to, Inkberrow, Rose Lench, Wickhamford, Broom, Broad Marston, Clifford Chambers, and three around Throgmorton.

Proceeding along the byway, at first we crossed a wild heath, a perfect sea of heather, gorse, brambles, and bracken, islanded here and there by dark clumps of pines, their tops being tossed about by the brisk breeze, a breeze that bent the bracken below and harassed and hurried along the white clouds above. There was movement everywhere; great gleams of golden sunshine and patches of grey shadow chased one another over the land and raked the distant hills, then, as our eyes followed them, lost themselves in space. We rejoiced in the open-air confusion and in the clearness of the wind-swept atmosphere that caused all objects in the view to be free from any obstructing haze or mist, and, to the vision, brought the distance so near.

So, keeping still on the ridge of the hill, we came to West Hoathly standing high above the country around. Here we pulled up under the shelter of a yew-tree overhanging the churchyard, and opposite to a clean and creeper-covered little inn curiously entitled "The Cat"; and this reminds me that we observed some singular inn signs during the journey, and here are samples of a few of them: "The World turned upside Down," but unfortunately there were only those words on the signboard; I should have liked to see a pictured representation of the world shown thus. Then there was "The Devil's Elbow"—how did that originate, I wonder?—and "The Merry Mouth," showing a big mouth smiling a welcome on the sign; "The Labour in Vain" had pictured two white men endeavouring to scrub a black man white, truly a quaint idea. In Wales I noticed "The Aleppo Merchant," a sign I had not seen before, and of its significance I know nothing. "The End of the World" was realised by the world in flames; and there were others.

AN OLD TUDOR HOME, WEST HOATHLY.

Strolling about the ancient village, I espied, on the further side of the churchyard, a grey old home of the Tudor time, so substantially built those long years ago that to-day it looks, but for the time-toning of its stones and the slight crumbling of one here and there, almost as perfect as when first finished. Its mullion windows are without the usual transomes, and do not seem to need them; their leaden lattice-panes gleamed, just then, cheerfully in the light. Windows are the eyes of a house, in their way as expressive as those of a human being. I like to see a clear eye and a bright window. The old home was retired behind a high and buttressed wall, and in the centre of the wall was an arched outer doorway.

Somewhat back from the village street
Stands the old-fashioned country seat.

Its roof is of stone slates, the most lasting and the most lovely kind of roof imaginable, beautiful when new, and yet more beautiful when old; the stone slates in this case, as in every other I know, being carefully "sized down, the smaller ones to the top and the bigger towards the eaves, which gives one the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fish's scales or a bird's feathers." There is no ornamentation at all about the building except some restrained carving at the top of the arched doorway in the garden wall; the charm of the building lies in its simplicity and goodly proportions, perhaps also in the feeling of lastingness in that it seems fitted to still stand unhurt, as in the past, all the winds and storms of heaven for years uncounted, without a thought of repairs. A modern builder's "desirable residence" never gives me such an impression—indeed, it does not appear to me even "desirable." We seem to have lost all love of building simply, let alone honestly. We too often seek after striking effect and even quaintness, so as to challenge attention, if not admiration, to the loss of all repose and the sentiment of home; for a man's dwelling-place should be first of all to him a home.

Once I knew a country squire who desired to build himself a house on a fresh and more healthy site than that in which he lived, so he employed an up-to-date architect, full of ideas, to design him one. In due course the architect placed the elevation of the proposed house before the squire. It was a most unrestful production of needless gables for the sake of gables, tortured stone, and meaningless carvings, in all styles and no style at all, but intended to be impressive and to please. The architect said he thought it original and that it would "look well in stone." "Good gracious," exclaimed the squire, "do you think I am going to take a chair and sit out-of-doors and look at my house? I want one to live in." "Those are the very words I said to him," the squire told me, adding, "I asked for a home, and he produced a nightmare!"

Modest in size though that old Tudor home at West Hoathly is, yet it suggests a certain sense of importance, just because it is so well built, with no pretence about it; and what a charm those two words, "no pretence," in an age of pretence and shams, convey. Pretence is an undesirable quality that threatens to submerge us all some day unless we cast it off, realising the utter nonsense and snobbishness of it. Modesty is a thing above most others to be desired, though a famous American once declared that "in our free country a man can get on very well without it." I quite believe that. But you cannot, architecturally speaking, in an ancient land "put new wine into old wine skins" successfully, or with any sense of artistic fitness—the new wine of novelty, I mean; that is best left for fresh lands that have no traditions.

I took a photograph of the old Tudor house from the churchyard, and there I got a-chatting with a man in a faded tweed suit who had watched my proceedings with apparent interest. I took him to be a local inhabitant, but to use an antiquary's favourite expression, "I could not quite sum him up," nor did he enlighten me as to who or what he was; but, after all, it was no affair of mine. At first he talked about the weather, by way of introduction, I presume, for it is a topic that never fails amongst country folk. I really do not know what they would do in dull places without the weather to praise or abuse; even the tramp, whose sole object is to beg, invariably first starts upon the weather, and so he feels his way.

"If you are interested in old places," said the stranger, "you should see the ancient priest-house a little lower down the road," pointing indefinitely into space. "It's well worth seeing; and you might like to take a glance at the church, it's very old too." I thanked him for the information. Then he led me to the porch and pointed out the oak door there that was grey, not dark, with age, begging me to notice the date upon it, marked in big studded nails, "March 31, 1626." "There's a Devil's door in the north wall; you might take a look at that now you're here, but it's built up," remarked my companion. "The Devil's door!" I exclaimed. "I never heard of such a thing. Surely the Devil does not go to church?" I was puzzled; I asked for enlightenment. "Well, you see," came the reply, "it's certainly not everybody nowadays who is aware of the fact, but in past times there used to be a small doorway on the north side of churches to let the Devil out when a child was baptized, and it was always kept open on such an occasion; but that's an ancient superstition." I was anxious to learn more about it. The stranger had become interesting, and I wished to chat longer with him; but he suddenly exclaimed, "I must be really getting home or the missus will wonder whatever has become of me. I promised to be home ten minutes ago; it don't do to offend my missus"—and I thought he laid a special and meaning emphasis on "my"; so he bade me a polite good-day and hurried off. He was a meek-looking man. I hope he did not get a scolding for the time he took talking to me. I wished his missus had been away from home that day, for I was anxious to learn more about the Devil's door; my curiosity was aroused. That call of the missus was most provoking. I nearly followed the stranger home to glean what further information on the way I could, but I thought he might not care for my company under the circumstances. Thus the traveller in out-of-the-way places picks up forgotten facts or fables, surprising traditions, and odd bits of local lore; but the chaff has to be winnowed from the corn.

On my return home I hunted in every likely book for any information upon the Devil's doorway, but found no allusion to the subject. I sought out several parsons, presuming that one of them would surely be able to throw some light on the matter; but they all declared that they had never heard of such a thing, so I began to think that the stranger had made a fool of me, and that I was myself a fool to be so easily taken in. Yet when I recalled the stranger's face, it had an honest look; he seemed hardly a man to invent so poor a joke, and, provided it was a joke, I failed to see the humour of it. Then one day afterwards, when chatting with a learned antiquary, I suddenly remembered about the Devil's door; so I mentioned the tale about it I had been told, and he confirmed the truth of it. "Such doors in churches were quite common, if not universal, long ago," he said; "they were always on the north or Devil's side of the church, and may still be found in many churches, though their purport has long been forgotten. I even remember a certain parson who, only twenty odd years past, insisted on having this door kept wide open during a christening, so as to afford a ready escape for the Devil, who was supposed to be driven out of the child." Curiously enough, after making so many vain inquiries on the subject, I found friends to whom the former existence and use of the Devil's door was quite well known.

Leaving the church I went down the village street to inspect the ancient priest-house. This proved to be a long, low, half-timber building; its roof was of stone slates, as most roofs of the period were; the house has manifestly been restored at some recent time, though carefully restored backwards, as far as I could judge, to the intention of the original builder. Unfortunately my photograph, here reproduced, gives no hint of the bloom of age that is upon it, or of the subtle curves of the weather-bleached timber caused by the stress of time. I have found in photographing many an ancient building, unless its walls are actually broken and decayed away, how little the photograph realises its antiquity. In my photograph of Boarstall Tower (that we shall come to later on), in spite of the years the tower has stood, and in spite of the battering of two sieges it has undergone, the ancient structure, hoary with the antiquity of over five centuries, looks almost as though the builder had but lately completed his work.

The approach to the priest-house was by a stone-flagged footway across a garden gay and sweet-scented with old-fashioned flowers. "Scents are the souls of flowers," says an old writer whose name I have forgotten: if only these hardy, old-fashioned flowers were rare and difficult to grow, how we should prize them for their charm of colour and their sweetness, both so happily combined! But the modern highly-paid gardener despises them as common: well, the uncultivated foxglove is common enough flourishing in neglected spots, yet no pampered hothouse flower seems half so graceful, stately, or pleasing to my eye.

A PRE-REFORMATION PRIEST-HOUSE, WEST HOATHLY.

The door of the house was of oak and nail-studded, and there was a quaintly-shaped iron knocker on it of some antiquity; a gentle tap or two of this brought an old woman to me. "Could I see the house?" I queried. "Why, certainly," she replied; "that's what I be here for, to show it to any one, and to take care of it. I'm only too pleased to see a visitor, I don't see many; it be a bit dull living here alone, it makes me feel almost silly like at times. Come in, please." Fortune was kind; I hardly expected to see over the place, and I found not only ready admission but a guide at my service. The old body proved intelligent but talkative; she told me one thing after another about the place and its history in such breathless succession that I scarce could follow her; I begged for a little time just to jot down a note or two, but as soon as I started to do this she recommenced prattling harder than ever. I think I never before met a woman capable of getting in so many words to the minute, though I have met many very capable ones in that respect. The worst of it was, she had really much of interest to relate, but so eager and in so much haste was she to relate it that I could only secure stray items out of her hurricane of abundance. She had the history of the old place by heart, and was learnedly—would only that she had been leisurely—informative about its contents.

First I was shown the living-room, or ancient kitchen, a picturesquely antique apartment with its low black-beamed ceiling, its red brick floor, its recessed lattice window, its door that opened with a wooden latch, its wide stone hearth fireplace, with andirons in position and logs of wood laid between them ready for the burning, not to forget the chimney crane with an iron pot suspended from it, nor the brick oven by the side for the baking of bread—and what superlatively excellent bread those old brick ovens produced! In some things we have progressed backwards, and one of these is the making and baking of bread. The iron fire-back, I noticed, had the royal arms cast in bold relief upon it, but in place of the unicorn was the Elizabethan griffin, and on the quarterings of the shield (I believe that is the correct heraldic expression) were only the three lions of England and the fleurs-de-lis of France, each repeated diagonally. On the big oak beam above the fireplace were carved sundry curious devices; they were but meaningless hieroglyphics to me, and the old body confessed that no one had been able to make anything of them; possibly they were "invented out of the carver's brain," with no other thought than to while away a dull hour or two.

A good deal of what the old body told me might have been told to the winds for aught I could remember or make note of; even an American tourist devoting ten whole days "to do" England in somehow, and allowing out of this twenty minutes for Westminster Abbey, could not have complained of such a guide delaying him. Not that all, or even the majority of Americans are like this, for I have met many cultured Americans seeing the old country every whit as leisurely as I. Indeed, I knew an American party who came over to take a motoring tour through England, and were so fascinated by a remote English village they chanced upon, besides finding there a really comfortable, old-fashioned inn, that the party, with one consent, stopped a whole week in that village, contentedly exploring the country around; and one of the party wrote me afterwards that she had never spent such a pleasant or a profitable week in her life, and she thought she might safely say the same of the rest.

Of the hurried notes I managed to make about the priest-house at the time, and those I set down from memory afterwards, I gathered that it was built not later than 1350, possibly earlier. Originally there was a large hall heated by a fire on a raised stone set in the centre, the smoke of which escaped through a hole in the roof, and the old plaster of the roof still shows the blackening caused by the smoke. At either end of the hall were doors leading to offices, the sleeping-rooms being above these. Such was its simple plan. About 1522 the present chimney was built on the site of the ancient open fire, and the hall divided into two compartments "as you now see it." "And how do you know all this?" queried I, when I could get a word in. "Well, you see, sir, at different times members of Archaeological Societies have been over to examine the building, and I always went over with them, and so I learnt a lot about it. The house was originally built by the Prior of Lewes as a hospital for invalid priests, and it also served the purpose of a guest-house for stray travellers; the roads in these parts were then but rough tracks through wild forests, full of wild beasts, they tell me. In the chimney a hiding hole was discovered, but it was only three feet square, and as a man could not get into it, it is supposed it was for hiding treasures, or perhaps books."

The old house was full of ancient furniture and of odds and ends of curious things that served our ancestors. I remember there was a steel striker and a flint with a tinder-box; I tried my prentice hand with these, and after several attempts at last obtained a light, but with difficulty; it must have been trying and tedious work using this steel, flint, and tinder-box on a cold winter's morning. Little wonder so many houses in past times had their fires piled up at night so that they might keep in till the morning, when the smouldering ashes readily caused the fresh fuel put on them to become ignited. At one old manor-house I went over some years back, I was informed that the fire in the hall had not been out for two centuries; even in summer it was kept alight, day and night, for the walls of that house were thick, and the hall was only pleasantly warm on the fine August noon when I was there. A friend of mine told me that in 1908 he discovered a cottage at Huckaback, Castleton, Yorkshire, where the turf fire had not been out for sixty-eight years.

Upstairs in the priest-house we noticed that the internal partitions were of wattle and daub; the daub, the old body said, consisting of pond slime combined with cow hair and chipped straw: pond slime does not sound nice, but the daub was lasting, to which fact my eye and the touch of my hand bore testimony. Then hanging on the walls we observed two parchment deeds framed, one being the original lease from "The Pryor of Lewes to T. Browne of Westhotheleigh, of the Parsonage House and barn." This was dated "9th yeare of Henry VIII." It did not escape my notice that, even so far back, this Brown rejoiced in an added "e." The other had two red seals attached, and related to the conveying of "the Rectory and Church of Westhotheley lately granted by Henry VIII. for her lyfe to Lady Anne Cleve." This was dated "Jan. 21st. 2nd of Elizabeth, 1560." The lettering of both of these documents was as clear and as black as the day they were written, and so quite easy to read, more so than many a modern letter I receive. The world has revolved countless times on its axis since the date of those deeds; but the writing of to-day is not so good as it was then, not even typewriting.

On the ceiling of one of the top rooms is a Dedication Cross, deeply cut, showing the religious nature of the house; also we noticed there, put on one side, some fine oak carving which I learnt formerly formed part of the chancel screen of the village church, it being torn down by the Puritans, who destroyed, or made a clearance of, "all carvings, images, and decorations" they found in the sacred edifice; and a rare clearance they appear to have made at West Hoathly. Besides this there was a large board showing signs of weathering, and plainly painted on it was "Cheese Room." "That," explained the guide, "did not belong to this place, but to a farmhouse near by. It is a relic of the window-tax days, when a window, used purely for trade purposes, was free of the tax, provided a notice of its use was placed above it. That is one of those notices. Possibly you may not have seen such a thing before." I had not. Indeed, I had almost forgotten that there had ever been such an iniquitous tax (and that there was a hearth-tax also), and was quite unaware of any such an exemption from it. I was always learning something on the road.

Very interesting is the old priest-house at West Hoathly, the more so because it is not bare, but supplied with ancient, though not the original, furniture in keeping with the place, and with domestic appliances that were used in days remote. On my return home I sought for particulars of this house in two or three modern guide-books to the county, but could find no mention of it, although the church was briefly noticed, which shows that guide-book compilers miss many interesting features by the way, to the discovery of which the traveller must trust to his own devices; and do we not take a special personal pride and a greater delight in the good things that we discover for ourselves, than in those we first read of, or are told about? Much of the charm of a journey lies in making these discoveries, and in the delightful state of expectancy of mind knowing not what each day, or even hour, may reveal.

CHAPTER V

"Great-upon-Little"—The woods of Sussex—A maze of lanes—Frensham Pond—A holiday haunt—The legend of the shivering reeds—Rural inns—Roughing it (?)—Waverley Abbey—The monks of old—The sites of abbeys—Quiet country towns—Stocks and whipping-post—A curious font—"A haven of rest."

About a mile from West Hoathly, on the way we took, we were told of a local "lion" in the shape of a huge rock, firmly balanced on a very small one, which together have earned the title of "Great-upon-Little." The great top rock looks insecure enough, and as though a push of the hand would almost send it over. This curious rock stands in a romantic and deeply wooded glen some half a mile or so from the main road, and many other strangely shaped rocks are to be found there; shapes manifestly due to the erosion of the softer stone leaving the harder portions to stand out more or less prominently. To one who has beheld the wonderful rock formations of the Yellowstone Valley in America, this "Great-upon-Little" may appear but a trivial thing; still, in its way it is striking. But it was the rock-girt glen with its green woods, a glen steeply winding down the rough hillside, that charmed me infinitely more than this natural freak—a veritable fairies' glen that would have made the fortune of any watering-place were it only near to it. Cobbett in his Rural Rides thus discourses about this rock in his own peculiar way: "At this place there is a rock which they call 'Big-upon-Little,' that is to say, a rock upon another, the top one being longer and wider than the top of the one it lies on. This big rock is no trifling concern, being as big, perhaps, as a not very small house. How, then, came this big upon little? What lifted up the big? It balances itself naturally enough, but what tossed it up? I do not like to pay a parson for teaching me while I have God's own Word to teach me; but if any parson will tell me how big came upon little, I do not know that I shall grudge him a trifle. And if he cannot tell me this; if he say, 'All that we have to do is to admire and adore,' then I tell him that I can admire and adore without his aid, and that I will keep my money in my pocket." Which shows, however clever an agriculturist he may have been, Cobbett was woefully ignorant of geology, whilst little he cared for scenery. The reading of his Rides, allowing for much skipping, was a wearisome task to me, and glad was I when I came to the end of the book. After this dose of Cobbett and his grumblings, I had to take a course of genial Charles Lamb to put me in good humour again.

Our road now took us by shadowy forests, which afforded us some shelter from the quiet rain which began to fall, and here and there we glimpsed, half drowned in foliage, a lowly cottage, with its film of ascending smoke, and now and then we caught a warm and fragrant whiff of burning wood that contrasted pleasantly with the cool scent of the many trees, their leaves rain-washed and shining. So we drove on through woods and woods again, with here and there a bit of wild waste, a patch of pasture, or a furrowed field, and here and there the gleam of water—driving first this way, then that, as it took our fancy. Some ways were wide and good, and some were narrow and bad, but the country had a remote and pleasant look; so with the roads I had no quarrel. The scenery concerns me more than the road. I never hesitate to desert the smooth highway for the rough and winding lane if the latter appear the more attractive. My mind is set on exploring, on seeking out odd nooks and corners, not on rushing from one town to another, though, when the highway suits my humour, along it I go contentedly enough.

So we drove on till we came to a more open country of meadows and tilled fields and stray farmsteads, but with woods beyond again, and over these a peep of distant hills with misty clouds upon them. A mellow, home-like land it was, where wandering streams kept fresh the greenery of the fields, and ancient footpaths wound in and out, and tangled hedges that so beautify the land, though they show poor husbandry, bordered the roadside on either hand. Then we struck upon a fair main road, though there was little traffic on it; in time the road forked in two, and at the fork a signpost pointed with one arm the way "To Guildford," and with the other arm the way "To Godalming." We chose the road to Godalming because it looked the more inviting. Now we passed other woods that climbed the low hills to our right, then we began to climb the hills ourselves, to descend again into the valley on the other side; so on through a rough country, dotted with pleasant homes, both old and new, we reached the long-streeted town of Godalming. I had an idea—how I came by it I cannot say—that Godalming was a pleasant and a picturesque town; my drive through it effectually got rid of that idea. I saw nothing pleasant or picturesque about it, even allowing for the determined and depressing drizzle that dulled the outlook. Perhaps I saw things crookedly that day, but to me, certainly, Godalming looked a one-streeted affair of commonplace houses and shops, with not a feature amongst the lot worth noticing, not even its old market-house.

The road we took out of the town chanced to be the famous Portsmouth road, much favoured by motorists and other vehicular traffic, and not caring for so much company, in due course we took a by-road to our right without a thought as to where it might lead. We soon got into a tangle of narrow, signpostless lanes; so narrow in one part, indeed, became our way that our hood actually at times brushed the hedges on either side, a lane where almost "two barrows might tremble when they meet." Indeed, had we met any cart, conveyance, or another motor I cannot imagine what we should have done, but we met nothing; for miles the tangle of lanes appeared to be endless, one as narrow as the other; then at last I espied a cottage and got down to ask where the lane led, for I felt like a man in a maze. Thrice I rapped loudly at the cottage door before I got an answer; then at the third emphatic rap an old woman appeared. "I be hard o' hearing," she remarked, by way of apology for her long coming. "The lane do lead to the pond. It's only about a mile farther on." "To the pond!" I exclaimed in astonishment. "What pond? We don't want to go to a pond!" "Why, the pond, to be sure," responded she; "but I've left my baking." And that was all I could get out of her, for, doubtless anxious about her baking, she rushed incontinently indoors and left me wondering. I could only presume that we were driving to a village pond, with the uncomfortable idea that there the narrow lane might end. There was nothing to do but to drive on—there was no space to turn; for miles we had not seen a soul, so unfrequented are some of the byways of populous England, but at last a man actually appeared trudging along the road. To him I repeated my query, and got the same reply!—"To the pond"—adding, "It be only a bit farther on." I was more puzzled than ever. "What pond?" asked I. "Why, Frensham Pond, to be sure." Then it dawned upon me that a friend of mine had spoken of Frensham Pond, to which he frequently went a-fishing, and where he told me was a good inn—"the very place for a quiet holiday," and he was an artist not likely to speak favourably of a spot that had no scenic attractions.

Right glad were we to escape from the narrow lane and to find ourselves at Frensham Pond, where the road widened out beside the still water, and where the little balconied inn my friend had told me about stood facing it. Now Frensham Pond is a large and beautiful sheet of water over a hundred acres in extent, and to go round it means a good three miles' walk, so the term pond is somewhat of a misnomer; "mere," I think, would be a better and less misleading title, more picturesque besides. A good deal depends on a name; at least one does expect a pleasant spot to bear a pleasant name: now "pond" is not one to conjure with.

It was raining again, so we pulled up under the shelter of a spreading tree opposite the hotel, whereupon the landlord appeared at the door and invited me within; but I explained that I was only halting there, as I thought the shower would soon be over, and I wished to admire the view. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, so what need had I of an inn? "It's a lovely spot," the landlord remarked, and as I looked over the little lonely lake with its near background of pines, of heathery hills beyond these, and nothing else in view, I fully agreed with him. Even in the rain the prospect pleased me; there was an individuality about it, it was fresh to my eye, nothing quite like it had I seen before. "You really should make up your mind to stop here," the landlord continued, doubtless with an eye to business. "There's fine fishing in the pond, and a boat at your service; there's plenty of big pike and perch that are willing to be caught"—which was very kind of the fish; I have not found them so obliging in other parts. There was a man in a boat on the water getting wet, but catching nothing, as far as I could make out, unless it were a cold. It seemed poor sport to me to sit thus patiently in a boat with the rain coming down, watching for the bob of a float on the chance of catching a fish not worth eating. Fly-fishing is quite another story. When you wander along the banks of some fair mountain river or stream, even if you have poor sport, you have a pleasant ramble over rock and boulder and amongst pleasant scenes; moreover, your time is ever agreeably occupied in casting your flies and watching them dance on the running water till comes a splash, a tug, and a tasteful trout good to look at, good to eat, and worth the basketing!

Suddenly the rain stopped, the grey clouds vanished, the sun shone forth again out of a sky as blue as the summer sea; the erst leaden lake looked like molten gold, the hills became a burning purple, but the dark pines seemed darker still by the contrast with the brightness around. What wind there was had dropped, but all the reeds were quivering, and I thought of the legend of the shivering reeds.

Leaving Frensham—where, by the way, in the tower of its church is preserved an ancient copper cauldron that tradition asserts once belonged to Mother Ludlam, a reputed local witch—we drove by devious roads through a sandy and heathery land, and into pine woods, the resinous odours of which filled pleasantly the air. We passed one or two lonely little inns on our way. To me a picturesque, though little regarded, feature of the roadside is the cosy country inn of the class that rises superior to the public-house but is less pretentious than an hotel, where I have found, during my old tramping days, humble doubtless, but sufficiently comfortable quarters, and where I got in touch with the simple and friendly country folk, and so could learn how the world treated them, and what they thought of it, and their ideas in general. The only way to do this is to mix with the country folk on their own ground, and clad in a suit of homely tweed, with often muddy boots, I was not looked upon as a superior person, so the talk I listened to was not curbed; only perhaps at times my speech, I feared, might betray me, for I could in no way manage the country accent, but I spoke little, whilst my ears did me silent service.

Imagination fondly stoops to trace
The parlour splendours of that festive place;
The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door.

"A GOOD HONEST ALEHOUSE."

Dear old Izaak Walton called such an inn "a good honest ale-house," and that title takes my fancy. "I'll now lead you to a good honest ale-house," says that rare old angler, "where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck upon the walls.... Come, hostess, where are you? Is supper ready?... Be as quick as you can, for I believe we are all very hungry." That is the sort of inn for me; I do not desire luxury when I go a-touring. The more homely my hostelry the more to my taste, so long as I find cleanliness, civility, and reasonable comfort thereat. I even enjoy what some people might term "roughing it" at times; in truth I have spent many delightful red-letter days (some of the most healthful and enjoyable I have ever spent) "roughing it" in a log-hut on the wild far-off Californian mountains, and there I found a wealthy and a titled Englishman doing the same thing, purely for the pleasure of it. If in some remote parts and on rare occasions I was doubtful as to the cleanliness of my inn, I made a point of not unpacking the car before I had sampled the landlord and the accommodation offered. I am glad to say that never once, on this journey, did I find the inn I selected fail to satisfy my modest requirements.

Loitering along we came at the foot of a long hill, passing first through gloomy woods, to a spot low down where the indolent winding Wey widened out into a quiet, clear-watered pool, and all around were pine-clad hills; an old water-mill and one or two ancient cottages completed the scene, just serving to humanise it and nothing more. It was a lovely spot, and there we pulled up to enjoy its beauties at our leisure. I know no other country in the wide world with spots so peace-bestowing as, here and there, one finds in England, and to come upon them unawares intensifies the charm of them; I cannot think of a word that precisely defines their special character, but "benign" is not far out.

Then I consulted the map and traced on it the river's course, and so made out, roughly, where we were, and it chanced I noticed on the map "Waverley Abbey" marked apparently near by. Now I had a dim recollection, but nothing more, that there was such an abbey, ruined of course, somewhere in England, but as to where it stood I had not given a thought up till that moment; if I had to hazard a guess as to its location, I am afraid I should have guessed Yorkshire, though the fact came back to me that Waverley Abbey suggested to Scott the title of one of his famous novels. Ivinghoe in Bucks is also credited with having given him the slightly altered title of Ivanhoe. Rumour asserts that his attention was called to the uncommon name by the local rhyme:

Tring, Wing, and Ivinghoe,
Hampden of Hampden did forego,
For striking ye Prynce a blow,
Glad that he might escape it so.

"Ye Prynce" was the Black Prince, and Hampden an ancestor of John Hampden, so tradition says, and the blow was given over a dispute about a game of racquets that Hampden lost. I love these old local rhymes and sayings that the inquiring traveller so often comes upon, for they frequently relate to past historical or traditional happenings that have been wholly or half forgotten, and are only otherwise to be found in odd musty volumes that no one cares to read.

We stopped the car in a sheltered corner not far from the lodge entrance to a pleasant park, and seeing no one around I ventured to ask at the lodge the whereabouts of the abbey. "You're close to it," responded the young woman, who promptly and civilly came at my call; "it's only a short walk across the fields." Moreover, she came outside and pointed me out the way, bidding me keep to the path by the river till I came to a bridge, "then to your left you will see the ruins." Clearer instructions could no one give, and so I found the abbey. Pleasant indeed was the short stroll to it by the side of the lazy river, with the greenest of green meadows on one hand so soft to the tread, and wide spreading trees on the other that threw "tangles of light and shadow below." So listlessly the water flowed it hardly seemed to flow at all; manifestly the river was loth to leave so fair a spot to join the stormy sea, and fain would linger there in peace. I think it was Wordsworth who first endowed Nature with a living personality.

Of Waverley's once stately pile little now is left but crumbling walls and vacant archways; still, its low, roofless remains cover much ground, a fact that attests its former size and glory. The quiet country around, I imagine, has not changed noticeably, if at all, since the abbey stood proudly there in its prime—to stand, as the early builders doubtless thought, till the Day of Doom; but the future was not at their command. As in the past the placid river flows by it without a murmur, the hills beyond rise boldly to the sky, the luscious meadows round about are the same luscious meadows that the old monks trod; but their erst lordly edifice is mostly dust, its stones having been basely used for other buildings, and for a long while to make and mend the roads; still, the country looks as green and fresh as ever, its youth renewed by every recurring summer. I can recall no spot of which so poignantly and so pregnantly may be said, "Sic transit gloria mundi."

An almost saintly silence brooded there; I heard neither stir of leaf nor song of bird, nor caught I sight of any living thing to break the solitude. It was as though the monks had laid a spell of profound peace over all, a spell unbroken yet—and may it never be!

A region of repose it seems,
A place of slumber and of dreams,
Remote among the wooded hills.

The peace-bestowing silence and restful solitude of the spot will linger with me as long as my memory lasts. Great must have been the temptation, in a troublous age, to be a monk, so to escape from all the turmoil of it, and to live at peace and at ease in some such earthly paradise. Many a world-weary man to-day well might sigh for such a harbour of rest.

Truly those monks of old had an eye for pleasant places; they built "in fair grounds," as the sites of their many abbeys prove. Father Gonzague, Prior of Storrington, puts it: "Some were built in the valley by the running stream, or on the jutting hill, overhanging the river bank, like St. Agatha's and Eggleston in Yorkshire; others close on the seashore, within hearing of the perpetual cadence of the waves, like Torre, the wealthiest of the English houses in Devonshire, on a spot the charm of which is not easily surpassed, backed by hills and uplands, with just room enough on the plain for the noble church, the monastery and its outbuildings, its gardens, its fish ponds, and its mill; or again among the deep and narrow dales of Derbyshire; or the gentle swell of the Kentish hills; in the forest land of Nottinghamshire, like Welbeck; or else in remote and wild retreats, speaking of penance and detachment, like the Abbey of Magdalen's Vale at Shap, in Westmoreland." Then there are others in situations quite as romantic and as gracious: there is Tintern by the winding Wye, Bolton by the tumbling Wharfe, Fountains sheltered amongst the woods, Rievaulx amongst the hills, Llanthony lone amongst the mountains, Cleeve secluded in the "Vale of Flowers," and many another—all in well-favoured spots and tranquil ones in ancient days, and some, like Waverley, as tranquil now.

A better judge of scenery than the monk of old there could not be; where stood his abbey there was a pleasant land, well watered, overflowing with beauty, and not seldom "overflowing with milk and honey" too. If one could trust that rare romancer Time, the monks were a jovial lot—"peace to their ashes"—reaping where they had not sown, and garnering where they had not toiled; making sure of heaven above whilst also making sure of the good things of the world below, ay, and enjoying them to the full as much as any sinner. To make the best of both worlds, especially this one, that was their motto, and they lived up to it. Of the modern monks that I have seen, one half look fat and lazy, the other half lean and sour, with an aspect of piety that would not have disgraced the strictest Puritan. But I know not if one can fairly judge of the old by the new. "Tempora mutantur," and possibly monks with them, and this is all that need be said.

Of the scant abbey ruins the only portion not wholly exposed to the weather is what looks like the crypt, with its fine and delicate Early English pillars and groined roof; but it has a fireplace, and from a label attached to its walls I learned it was the "Layman's Refectory." The rest of the ruins are roofless, and it is difficult to make out, with any certainty, even the site of the church—at least I found it so. On the greensward I noticed, level with the ground surface, a stone coffin vacant and exposed to the sky, presumably discovered there and left undisturbed save for the removal of its covering; this was hollowed out to the shape of a body, with a place for the head; probably it belonged to one of the stately abbots' dust and ashes long years ago, but the interior of the stone still preserves the chisel marks of the ancient mason, as sharp almost to-day as when first made. Somehow those marks so old, yet so clear, that but for the time-stains upon them might be of recent date, bridged over the centuries and brought the past quite close to me.

Leaving the old abbey to its peaceful seclusion, we once more resumed our way and soon found ourselves at Farnham, far famed for its castle and its ancient coaching hostelry—"The Bush," to wit—and possibly also for hops and ale, but of these I am not so sure. "The Bush," says Thackeray in his Virginians, "is a famous inn which has stood in Farnham town for these three hundred years." But why I refer to this old house, in passing, is that its sign is the oldest of signs, which, in ancient days, consisted simply of a bush hung out at the end of a pole to show that wine, or ale, was sold there. Hence doubtless the saying of Shakespeare, "Good wine needs no bush."

After Farnham we struck the Winchester highway, dusty with much traffic at the time, so to escape both the traffic and the dust we took the first lane we came to—a lane that led past hop-gardens, up hill and down again; next winding round a well-wooded park it brought us to the little out-of-the-world village of Crondall, where I noticed one or two quaint half-timber houses of sufficient charm to cause me to stop and sketch them. Then after a short stretch of tree-bordered road we arrived at Odiham, a sleepy, sunny, wide-streeted town to which "no noisy railway speeds"; perhaps because of this it retains unhurt so much of its past-time naturalness. On a previous journey we had driven through Odiham, without however stopping, even though it pleased us, but we reached it by a different way. There is often a great deal in the first impression of a place, and this frequently depends upon how you approach it. No doubt there is a certain charm in the first view of fresh places, when such places possess the power to please and present themselves under favourable aspects, but it is wisdom not to linger in them overlong lest the eye should discover imperfections, so their poetry lose much of its glamour, or wholly vanish like a dream that has passed.

Before, when at Odiham, the "George" inn there, facing the roadway with its cheerful front and projecting sign, attracted my attention: a typical old coaching hostelry that looks as though it had seen more prosperous days, yet it had not retired from business but kept open wide its doors, bravely facing changed circumstances. "Posting House" in letters large is still boldly displayed on its front, but its posting is done to-day by the landlord's motor-car! Paterson's Roads, the Bradshaw of our ancestors, mentions the "George" as the inn of the place, and nearly every old roadside inn one comes across still retains the very title given to it in that rare eighteenth and early nineteenth-century road-book, according to which of its many editions one consults.

Now being, by chance, at Odiham again, I thought I would put up at the "George" and sample its entertainment. Quarters in the real country best please me, but they do not always materialise; next I prefer a modest hostelry in some quiet little town, and here I had my desire. So beneath the sign of the "George" I slept that night, and there I found a pleasant garden in the rear, good fare of the simple sort, much civility, and a most moderate bill; so, when next morning I departed, I left it with my blessing. I discovered that the inn was, unfortunately, for sale; it may have been sold by now. I can only trust that the old house may fall into the hands of worthy successors, and that it will, for as long as it stands, and long may that be, retain its good old name; for it must be remembered it is the landlord makes the inn.

Does not Alonzo of Aragon say that the recommendations of age are "old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read"? and I should like to add old inns to rest at, and by preference those inns of the candle or lamp, mahogany or oak furniture, and wood-fire-on-the-hearth period, and these, the Fates be praised, are still to be found by the diligent searcher, and when found the wise traveller will not tell everybody about them. In this respect selfishness is a virtue, a moral obligation for the benefit of other quiet-loving travellers; for it is so easy to convert the old into the new, but the new cannot be converted into the old. I was tempted to photograph one of these ancient little inns I chanced upon, on account of its artistic signboard, for it is rare to meet with such artistic creations, though a few may be found to delight the eye of the wayfarer. My photograph, here reproduced, will show the skilful and effective painting of this signboard.

Having still an hour or two of daylight left, I took a stroll round the little town; it did not take me long; then I came to the church, and in the roadway before it I discovered, carefully roofed over, its ancient stocks and whipping-post; evidently the Odiham people prize these relics of "the good" or bad "old days." Then I took a glance within the church, where I found much to interest me; there I noticed seven old brasses in an excellent state of preservation—for old brasses—and these were kept both bright and clean; they were fixed against the south wall all in close order, being doubtless removed from the floor at some former restoration. Though removed thus from their proper place over the dust they commemorate, and where they should rightly be, they certainly are seen to better advantage where they are—and their dead owners are not far off. All the brasses but two happily retain their inscriptions; the earliest bears date of 1400; one to a priest in his vestments that of 1498; and there is one to a man in armour, roughly but effectively engraved. The piscina, I noticed, had an ornamented pillar support; I do not remember having seen such an arrangement before. I noticed also the finely carved Elizabethan or Jacobean pulpit, and besides, a thing you seldom nowadays see in churches, an oak gallery, of considerable antiquity, upheld by stout oak posts. Then I became aware that I was not alone in the building, for I heard quiet footsteps, and looking round observed a man at the font, apparently examining it with considerable interest, so too I needs must go and examine it. Said the stranger to me, "This is a curious font and a very ancient one." "It certainly looks it," I replied. "Perhaps you may not know," he continued, "but it possesses a peculiar feature only to be found in one other font in England, and that is at Youlgrave in Derbyshire. Permit me to point out to you the cup-like projection on the top; this is provided to drain back into the basin any drops of water that might be accidentally spilt at a christening." Some people delight to be informing, but the information they impart depends for its value on their special knowledge of special subjects. I observed that the stranger was carefully consulting a handbook when I approached him, which he put away in his pocket, and I thought to myself possibly the stranger has just read up about the font in that book, and is merely imparting to me second-hand information gleaned from it just for the self-importance of imparting it, and to show his cleverness. I might have done him an injustice, but he spoke in a manner so authoritative as to challenge criticism. Anyway I have not the implicit faith in handbooks most people have, for more than once I have found them wrong in facts beyond dispute. So I have examined for myself the "curious" projection, being a bit of an archaeologist, though not a learned one, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing curious about it, and that it had merely been intended to receive a hinge for a font cover. But such an explanation is perhaps too simple to be satisfactory to certain minds to which only the singular or mysterious appeals.

AT "THE QUEEN'S HEAD."

Round the top of the font runs a much-worn inscription in long Lombardic, or other early lettering, of which I could make nothing; no more could the stranger, but he made excuse that the light was very poor; so it was. "If we only had a guide-book," I said suggestively, but he failed to take the hint.

Leaving the church I noticed some picturesque alms-houses adjoining its quiet "God's Acre," built of brick but grey with age, of one story, uneven-roofed, with shapely chimney-stacks, which houses with their enclosed garden, full of flowers—and weeds—reminded me of Walker's famous picture "A Haven of Rest," though they were not the original of it. Then as the sun was setting I sought "mine inn."