Modern Crawley is disfigured by the abomination of a busy railway level-crossing that bars the main road and causes an immeasurable waste of public time and a deplorable flow of bad language. It affords a very good idea of the delays and annoyances at the old turnpike-gates, without their excuse for existence. Beyond it is the Park Lane or Belgravia of Crawley—the residential and superior modern district of country houses, each in midst of its own little pleasance.

The cutting in the rise at Hog’s Hill passed, the road goes in a long incline up to Hand Cross, by Pease Pottage, where there is now a post-office which spells the name wrongly, “Peas.” No one knows how the place-name originated; but legends explain where facts are wanting, and tell variously how soldiers in the old days were halted here on their route-marching and fed with “pease-pottage,” the old name for pease-pudding; or describe how prisoners on the cross-roads, on their way to trial at the assizes, once held at Horsham and East Grinstead alternately, were similarly refreshed. Formerly called Pease Pottage Gate, from a turnpike-gate that spanned the Horsham road, the “Gate” has latterly been dropped. It is a pretty spot, with a triangular green and the old “Black Swan” inn still standing at the back. The green is not improved by the recent addition of a huge and ugly signboard, advertising the inn as an “hotel.” The inquiring mind speculates curiously as to whether the District Council (or whatever the local governing body may be) is doing its duty in allowing such a flagrant vulgarity, apart from any question of legal rights, on common land. Indeed, the larger question arises, in the gross abuse of advertising notice-boards on this road in particular, and along others in lesser degree, as to whether the shameful defacement of natural scenery by such boards erected on land public or private ought not to be suppressed by law. Nearer Brighton, the beautiful distant views of the South Downs are utterly damned by gigantic black hoardings painted in white letters, trumpeting the advantages of the motor garage of an hotel which here, at least, shall not be named. Much has been written about the abuse of advertising in America, but Englishmen, sad to say, have in these latter days outdone, and are outdoing, those crimes, while America itself is retrieving its reputation.

This is the Forest Ridge of Sussex, where the Forest of St. Leonards still stretches far and wide. Away for miles on the left hand stretch the lovely beechwoods and the hazel undergrowths of Tilgate, Balcombe, and Worth, and on the right the little inferior woodlands extending to Horsham. The ridge is, in addition, a great watershed. From it the Mole and the Medway flow north, and the Arun, the Adur, and the Sussex Ouse south, towards the English Channel. Hand Cross is the summit of the ridge, and the way to it is coming either north or south, a toilsome drag.

At Tilgate Forest Row the scenery becomes park-like, laurel hedges lining the way, giving occasional glimpses of fine estates to right and left. Here the coachmen used to point out, with becoming awe, the country house where Fauntleroy, the banker, lived, and would tell how he indulged in all manner of unholy orgies in that gloomy-looking mansion in the forest.

Henry Fauntleroy was only thirty-nine years of age when he met the doom then meted out to forgers. As partner in the banking firm of Marsh, Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street, he had entire control of the firm’s Stock Exchange business, and, unknown to his partners, had for nine years pursued a consistent course of illegally selling the securities belonging to customers—forging their signatures to transfers. Paying the interest and dividends as usual, the frauds, amounting in all to £70,000, might have remained undiscovered for many years longer; but the credit of the bank, long in a tottering condition, was exhausted in September, 1824, when all was disclosed. Fauntleroy was arrested on the 11th, and on the 14th the bank suspended payment.