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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.