The houses of this broad street are curiously irregular. Great palatial mansions alternate with humble taverns; the busy “White Hart” stands next door to the Duke of Devonshire’s house, and shops elbow other imposing residences of the great. On the right hand, as you enter the town, is the large red-brick pile of Queensberry House, built a few years ago by Lord Wolverton, and at first styled “Ugly House,” from a successful racehorse of that name; and everywhere in the town its turfy sympathies are declared in the villas christened with titles that mean much to those versed in turf history. The customary “Elms,” “Limes,” and “Montserrats” of villadom here give place to “Bend Or,” “St. Gatien,” and other horsey mottoes.

But the town has every reason to regret the past. In days before railways, a race-meeting meant these great establishments being occupied for days at a time; now it is easily possible to return comfortably to London in the evening, they are often in use only for a few hours, and many have long been to let. Where the Palace stood, a Congregational Chapel and a row of shops front the street.

The churches—St. Mary’s on the Suffolk and All Saints’ on the Cambridgeshire side—are, on the other hand, quite humble buildings, and tucked away out of sight in most apologetic fashion, as though in this Metropolis of the Turf religion were bidden take a back place. Cynic circumstance has decreed that the best—and, indeed, almost the only—view of St. Mary’s, the most important of the two buildings, is that gained from the yard of that eminently sporting and horsey inn, the “White Hart.” From that point it certainly does contribute to a fine picture, although its tapering spire, with the clock-bell placed in a little hutch on one side of the tower, is quaint, rather than pretty or intrinsically striking. It stands in a damp little churchyard, closely hemmed in by narrow streets and lanes, with several very old tombstones inserted in the buttresses; among them one of a seventeenth-century actor of the Theatre Royal, Newmarket, who in jaundiced tones and the most gruesome spelling, tells us that life is fleeting and we shall be as he, and so forth. The old hunks! Sorry himself to leave the stage of life, he made his exit with that cheering reflection that the curtain must presently be rung down on the whole company.

It is a dark church within, and with little to reward the pilgrim; but a curious relic exhibited in a frame on the north wall is interesting. It is a small purse, found in 1857, during the rebuilding of the south wall of the chancel. In the course of those operations two debased windows and an Early English piscina were found. On the top of the piscina was the purse, of faded white silk, with large tassels, and containing three Reichening pfennigs or Nuremburg jettons, specimens of the well-known counters or tokens made in the first part of the sixteenth century by Hans Schultz, of Nuremburg. They bear on one side the device of the Reichs apple within a trefoil, and on the reverse an heraldic rose, surrounded by crowns and fleurs-de-lis. They and the purse all date from about 1500. A purse of this character is generally represented in sacred heraldry as the receptacle of the thirty pieces of silver, the reward of Judas’s betrayal. Maundy money was distributed in purses of this pattern, so late as the reign of Charles II.

Near by is a tablet to the memory of a Rector, who died in his thirtieth year, in 1681. His epitaph tells us, “Here lie the mortal remains of R. Cooke, late Rector of this parish, whose tongue or life I know not which was the most eloquent.” He exerted himself so much while preaching that he broke a blood-vessel, and died in the pulpit. “Thus,” concludes the epitaph, somewhat extravagantly, “he poured out his life-blood for the Gospel.”

The Church of All Saints, at the other side of the High Street, and in Cambridgeshire, was wholly rebuilt, as a memorial to Colonel Lord George John Manners, of Cheveley Park, in 1876. It is interesting only because of the small black marble tablet, about the size of a pocket-handkerchief, to the memory of Tregonwell Frampton, which was on the chancel wall of the old church, but has been shouldered away in the new building to the darkness of so high a position on the wall of the tower that the inscription cannot be read without the aid of a ladder. Frampton, who came of a race of landed proprietors in Dorsetshire, was “Father of the Turf,” and, as the inscription on the tablet states, “Keeper of the Running Horses to their Sacred Majesties, William the Third, Anne, George the First and Second.” He died, considerably over eighty years of age, in 1727, and thus ended a remarkable career of bold and eventful gambling in his youth, variegated by a later course as trainer for those four monarchs. For that is what the phrase, “Keeper of the Running Horses,” means. Historians of racing are even yet uncertain as to the truth of the grave charge made against him of mutilating the famous horse Dragon, in order to qualify him technically for a particular race, the evidence against him not being sufficiently convincing. The year of this alleged offence was 1682. It seems scarce credible that he would afterwards have occupied that position of trust with William III. and the three succeeding sovereigns had there been any foundation for the charge