The red-brick face of the “White Horse” is set off and embellished by a very wealth of elaborate old Renaissance wood-carving that decorates the coach-entrance. It was obviously never intended for its present position, and is said to have come from an old manor-house at Chalgrave, demolished many years ago. Long exposure to the weather and generations of neglect have wrought sad havoc with this old work. A fragment in the kitchen gives the date 1566, and some strips under the archway, with the inscription “John Havil dwiling in cars,” present a mystery not easy to solve.

The ominous Battlesden Park, belonging to the Dukes of Bedford, with jealously locked lodge-gates that hinder the harmless tourist from inspecting the church within the demesne, is one of a vast chain of Russell properties stretching for miles across country, from here to Woburn and away to the Great North Road at Wansford. Battlesden is without a tenant, except for those who tenant family vaults and resting-places in the little churchyard: Duncombes within and nobodies in particular without. It was one of these Duncombes of Battlesden—Sir Samuel—who in 1624 introduced Sedan-chairs into England. Weeping marble cherubs on Duncombe monuments, rubbing marble knuckles into marble eyes, testify to grief overpast, but Nature, indifferent as ever, keeps a cheerful face. It here becomes evident that we are on the borders of a stone country, for the little church tower is partly built of that ferruginous sandstone whose rusty red and yellow is for the next thirty miles to become very noticeable.

Gaining the summit of Sandhill, a house lying back from the road, on the left, is seen, with traces of a slip-road to it and through its grass-grown stable-yard. It is a noticeable red-brick house, with a steep tiled roof crowned by a weather-vane. Once the “Peacock” inn, it has for many years been a private residence. A short distance beyond, past the cross-roads known as Sheep Lane, Bedfordshire is left behind for the county of Buckingham, through which for the next twelve miles, to the end of Stony Stratford, the Holyhead Road takes its way.

Buckinghamshire, on the map, is a quaintly shaped county, standing as it were on end, washing its feet in the Thames at Staines, and with its head in the Ouse, in the neighbourhood of Olney. Wags have compared it with a cattle-goad, “because it sticks into Oxon and Herts.” The glimmerings of possible similar verbal atrocities are apparent in the fact that it is also bordered by Beds and Berks. Northants and Middlesex also march with its frontiers. Its name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “bucken,” alluding to the beech woods that spread over it, but more particularly in the south, on the densely wooded Chiltern Hills. The Welsh language, innocent of any word for the beech, bears out the statement of CÆsar, that this tree was unknown in Britain at the time of his invasion.

Little Brickhill is the first place that Buckinghamshire has to show, and a charming old-world place it is, despite its name, which, together with those of its brothers Great and Bow Brickhills near by, prepares the traveller for—of course—bricks. But the greater number of houses here are stone. It is difficult to imagine this little hillside village an assize town; but so it once was, and the “Sessions House,” a small Tudor building, one of the few in red brick, still stands as a memento of the time when this was the scene of the General Gaol Delivery for the county of Bucks, from 1433 to 1638. The chief reason for this old-time judicial distinction appears in the fact that Aylesbury, the county town, was practically unapproachable during three parts of the year, owing to the infamously bad bye-roads.

The old “George” inn, that stands directly opposite the Sessions House, is not the only inn at Brickhill against whose name “fuit” must be written. Others, now vanished, were the “White Lion,” now the Post Office, with some delicate decorative carving on its front (the old sign is still preserved upstairs); the “Swan,” the “Shoulder of Mutton,” and the “Waggon.” The class of each one of these old houses may still be traced. The “George” was beyond comparison the chief, and legends still linger of how the old fighting Marquis of Anglesey came up and stayed here as Lord Uxbridge with two legs, and returned after Waterloo as Lord Anglesey with one. They say, too, that the Princess Victoria once halted here the night. In the churchyard, that so steeply overlooks the road at the hither end of the village, you may see stones to the memory of William Ratcliffe, the last host of the “George,” his wife, his relatives, and his servants. He died, aged eighty-two, in 1856; his wife in 1842. Many years before, a servant, Charlotte Osborne, had died, aged thirty-eight; the stone “erected by three sisters, as a tribute of their regard for a faithful servant, and as a testimony to one who anxiously endeavoured to alleviate the sufferings of a beloved and lamented parent upon a dying bed.” Here also is the epitaph of Isaac Webb, “for more than forty years a good and faithful servant to Mr. Ratcliffe of the ‘George Inn,’ during which he gained the esteem of all who knew him.” He died, aged fifty-eight, in 1854.

The old “George” is now occupied—or partly occupied, for it is a very large house—by a farm bailiff. Just what it and its old coach-yard are like let these sketches tell.

Within the church a curious wooden-framed tablet records the death at Little Brickhill of an old-time traveller when journeying from London to Chester. This was “William Bennett, son of the Mayor of Chester. He died March 19th, 1658.

But most curious of all is the stone in the churchyard to a certain “True Blue,” who died in 1725, aged fifty-seven. Time has lost all count of “True Blue,” who or what he was, and speculation is futile. If only the vicar who entered his burial in the register had noted some particulars of him, how grateful we should be for the unveiling of this mystery! Those registers have, indeed, no little interest, containing as they do the gruesome records of many criminals executed in the old gaol deliveries, as well as of a woman who was wounded at the battle of Edge Hill and died of her hurts.