Larlingford, a tiny hamlet on the Thet, in a dip of the road, long since became a misnamed place, for the ford is replaced by a bridge, itself of a respectable age. Two miles beyond the old ford there existed in Ogilby’s time, in the second half of the seventeenth century, a beacon on the right-hand side of the road, duly pictured on his road map as a cresset, or fire-basket, mounted on a post and reached by ladders; a contrivance eloquently witnessing to the wild state of the road in those times.

A little way beyond the site of the old beacon, at Hargham—or, as the country folk have it, “Harfham”—cross-roads, stands a time-worn stone shaft, reared on equally shapeless steps. The country folk call this shattered stump of an ancient wayside cross “Cockcrow Stone.”

It is only when exploring to right and left of the road, along the byways, that the stranger comes in touch with rural life. The great highway goes lonely, for mile after mile the country seems deserted; but, unknown to him who does not turn aside from the beaten track, villages cluster, like beads upon a string, continuously along the lesser roads. A little way back from these cross-roads of Hargham comes Hargham village, and then the village of Wilby, in whose church, recently restored, has been discovered, under one of the old floor-boards, a lady’s hawking gauntlet some three centuries old. Framed and exhibited on the wall, it forms a trivial yet intimate link with the past.

But to reach the church and village one must pass Wilby Old Hall, a romantic building of red brick, with corbie-stepped gables, that peer darkly across the meadows. One cannot resist a closer glance, and the old place well repays that attention. It is now, and long has been, a farmhouse, but was built as a mansion somewhere about the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was when Elizabeth reigned, or in the first years of James I., that the hall first rose within the girdle of its moat: that moat only in part now remaining, but still plentifully stocked with fish. A family of Lovells probably built it; but the place soon passed from them into the hands of the Wiltons, of whom Robert Wilton, a Royalist colonel, had it at the time of the Civil War. Scratched with a diamond on a pane of one of the old casement windows of an upstairs bedroom is the name “Elizabeth,” with the date 1649. The surname is included, but is illegible. Perhaps it was this Elizabeth who inscribed the Latin lines on another window—lines that seemed to hint at some heavy sorrow. “Alas!” they said, when translated, “Alas! how can I tune my lute to a broken heart!” We may seek in vain for the personal sorrow that prompted this record; or was it the outpouring of a loyal soul? for the year 1649, when the unknown Elizabeth inscribed her name on the other casement, was the date of the execution of Charles I.

Those lines, we say, seemed to hint, and they are thus spoken of because quite recently, when the house was the scene of a sale at auction and pervaded by strangers, some unknown person prized the inscribed pane out of its leaden setting and made off with it. Invoking a murrain on all such, we come into the ancient market-town of Attleborough.