INNS RETIRED FROM BUSINESS

That striking feature of the last few years, the voluntary or the compulsory extinction of licences, with its attendant compensation, has created not a little stir among people with short memories, or no knowledge of their country, who cherish the notion, “once an inn, always an inn,” and forget the wholesale ruin that befell inns all over the land upon the introduction of railways, causing hundreds of hostelries to close their doors. The traveller with an eye for such things may still identify these inns retired from business, chiefly by their old archways and entries into stable-yards, but to the expert, even when those features are absent, there is generally some indefinable air about a house once an inn that singles it out from others. Such an one is the immense, four-square, red-brick farm-house midway between Lichfield and Burton-on-Trent, once a coaching- and posting-house famous in all that countryside as the “Flitch of Bacon”; such was the exclusive “Verulam Arms” at St. Albans, where mere plebeian coach-passengers wore not suffered, and only the high and mighty who could afford post-chaises were condescended to. The “Verulam Arms” had, however, the briefest of careers. Built in 1827, railways ruined it in ten years, and, shorn of its vast stables, on whose site a church has been built, it has ever since been in private occupation. In short, along the whole course of the Holyhead Road the inns retired from business are an especial feature, the village of Little Brickhill being little else than a place of old hostelries and taverns of every class, whose licences have long ago been surrendered, for lack of custom. Thus you may travel through to Anglesey and be continually passing these evidences of the ruin caused by railways, once so distressing to many interests, and a pitiful commentary upon the activity of inventors; but long ago fallen back into that historical perspective in which ruin and wrong become the sign-posts of “progress.” The chief inns that are inns no longer on this north-western road through England are numerous; the minor taverns and ale-houses that have closed their doors innumerable. Among others, we have—speaking merely at a venture—the aristocratic “Bull’s Head,” Meriden, the “Haygate” inn, near Wellington, the “Talbot,” Atcham, “Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and “Prince Llewelyn,” Cernioge—all establishments of the first order; and if we turn to the Great North Road, a very similar state of things is found. On that great highway the famous “Haycock” inn at Wansford bravely kept its doors open until recent years, but could endure no longer and is now a hunting-box belonging to Lord Chesham. The “New Inn” at Allerton is now a farm-house; the celebrated “Blue Bell” on Barnby Moor became a country seat, and the very moor itself is enclosed and cultivated. The “Swan” and “Angel,” both once great and prosperous coaching-houses at the busy town of Ferrybridge, have ceased their hospitality, and the “Swan” itself, once rather oddly kept by a Dr. Alderson, who combined the profession of a medical man with the business of innkeeping, has been empty for many years past, and stands mournfully, falling into ruin, amid its gardens by the rive Aire.

Quite recently, after surviving for over sixty years the coming of the railway and the disappearance of the coaches from the Brighton Road, the old “Talbot” at Cuckfield has relinquished the vain struggle for existence, and old frequenters who come to it will find the house empty, and the hospitable invitation over the doorway, “You’re welcome, what’s your will?” become, by force of circumstances, a mockery.

There is a peculiar eloquence in the Out-of-Date, the Has Been. Institutions and ancient orders of things that have had their day need not to have been intrinsically romantic in that day to be now regarded with interest. Whether it be a road much-travelled in the days before railways, and now traced only by the farm-labourer between his cottage and his daily toil, or by the sentimental pilgrim; or whether it be the wayside inn or posting-house retired from public life and now either empty or else converted into a farm-house, there is a feeling of romance attaching to them really kin to the sentiment we cherish for the ruined abbeys and castles of the Middle Ages.

Scouring England on a bicycle to complete the collection of old inns for this book, I came, on the way from Gloucester to Bath, upon such a superseded road, studded with houses that had once been coaching hostelries and posting-houses and are now farmsteads; and others that, although they still carry on their licensed trade, do so in strangely altered and meagre fashion, in dim corners of half-deserted and all-too-roomy buildings. It is thirty-four miles of mostly difficult and lonely road between those two cities: a road of incredible hills and, when you have come past Stroud and Nailsworth, of almost equally incredible solitudes. You climb painfully up the north-westerly abutments of the Cotswolds, to the roof of the world at a place well named Edge, and there in a bird’s-eye view you see Painswick down below, and thenceforward go swashing away steeply, some three miles, down into the crowded cloth-weaving town of Stroud, where most things are prosperous and commonplace, and only the “Royal George Hotel” attracts attention, less for its own sake than by reason of the lion and unicorn over its portico: the lion very golden and very fierce, apparently in the act of coming down to make a meal of some temerarious guest; the unicorn more than usually milk-white and mild-mannered.

A DESERTED INN: THE “SWAN,” AT FERRYBRIDGE.

Beyond Nailsworth begin the hills again, and the loneliness intensifies after passing the admirably-named Tiltups End. “How well the name figures the gradient!” thinks the cyclist who comes this way and pauses, after walking two miles up hill, to regain his breath. He has here come to the very ideal of what we learned at school to be an “elevated plateau, or table-land”; and a plaguy ill-favoured, inhospitable place it is, too, yet not without a certain grim, hard-featured interest in its starveling acres, its stone-walled, hedgeless fields, and distant spinneys. It is interesting, if only serving to show that to our grandfathers, who perforce fared this way before railways, their faring was not all jam. Nor is it so to the modern tourist who—experto crede—faces a buffeting head-wind in an inclement April, and encounters along these weary miles a succession of snow-blizzards and hail-showers: all in the pursuit of knowledge at first-hand. The way avoids all towns and villages, and all wayfarers who can shift to do so avoid this way; and you who must trace it have but occasional cottages, often empty and ruinous, or a lonely prehistoric sepulchral barrow or so for company—and they are not hilarious companions. Your only society is that rarely failing friend and comforter—your map, and here even the map is lacking in solace, for when it ceases to trace a merely empty road, it does so chiefly to chronicle such depressing names as “Starveall,” an uncomplimentary sidelight on the poor land where neither farmers can live nor beasts graze; or others as mysterious as “Petty France,” a hamlet with two large houses that once were inns. “Cold Ashton,” too, is a name that excellently figures the circumstances of the route. Even modern portents have a ghastliness all their own, as when, noticing two gigantic, smoke-and-steam-spouting ventilators, you realise that you are passing over the long Sodbury tunnel of the new “South Wales Direct” branch of the Great Western Railway.

Beyond this, in a wooded hollow at the cross-roads respectively to Chipping Sodbury and Chippenham, you come past the wholly deserted “Plough” inn to the half-deserted, rambling old coaching-and posting-inn of “Cross Hands,” where a mysterious sign, unexplainable by the innkeeper, hangs out, exhibiting two hands crossed, with squabby spatulate fingers, and the inscription “Caius Marius Imperator B.C. 102 Concordia Militum.” What it all means apparently passes the wit of man, or at any rate of local man, to discover.

Passing the solitudes of Dodington and Dirham parks, with the forbidding, heavy, mausoleum-like stone lodges the old squires loved to erect as outposts to their demesnes, and encountering a toll-house or so, the road at last, three miles from Bath, dips suddenly down. You see, from this eyrie, the smoke of Bath, the roofs of it and the pinnacles of its Abbey Church, as it were in the bottom of a cup, and, ceasing your labour of pedalling, you spill over the rim, into the very streets, feeling like a pilgrim not merely from Gloucester, but from all the world.

Notable among the inns retired from business is the little “Raven” at Hook, on the Exeter Road, before you come to Basingstoke. It ceased in 1903 to be an inn, and the building has since been restored and converted into a private residence styled the “Old Raven House.” Built in 1653, of sound oak framing, filled with brick-nogging in herring-bone pattern, it has been suffered to retain all its old-world features of construction, and thus remains an interesting specimen of seventeenth-century builders’ work.

THE OLD “RAVEN,” HOOK.

But it is on quite another count that the “Raven” demands notice here. It was the wayside inn at which the infamous “Jack the Painter,” the incendiary of Portsmouth Dockyard, stayed on the way to accomplish his evil purpose.

James Hill, a Scotsman, and a painter by trade, went under the assumed names of Hind and John Aitkin. Visiting America, he there acquired a maniacal hatred for England, and returned with the design of setting fire to all our great dockyards, and thus crippling our resources against the foreign foe. On December 7th, 1776, he caused a fire at Portsmouth Dockyard that wrought damage to the extent of £60,000. Arrested at Odiham on February 7th, 1777, he was very speedily brought to trial at Winchester, and executed on March 10th, being afterwards gibbeted, a good deal higher than Haman, at Blockhouse Beach, from the mizzen-mast of the Arethusa, especially set up there for the purpose, 64½ feet high. One of the choicest and most thrilful exhibits at the Naval Exhibition of 1891 at Chelsea was a tobacco-stopper made out of a mummified finger of this infernal rascal.

The derelict inns of the Exeter Road are not so numerous, but a striking example is found at West Allington, outside Bridport, where the old “Hearts of Oak” stands forlorn, a small portion of it in private occupation and a long range of stables and wayside smithy gradually becoming ruinous and overgrown with ivy. The old lamp remains over the door of the inn, and in it, typical of this picture of ruin, the sparrow has built her nest.The most singular instance of an inn retired from business must surely be that of the “Bell” at Dale, near Derby, but more singular still is the circumstance of its ever having become a public-house, for the building was once actually the guest-house of Dale Abbey. Since it ceased to be a village ale-house, some seventy-six years ago, it has become a farm.

THE “HEARTS OF OAK,” NEAR BRIDPORT.

The illustration shows the extraordinary features of the place: on the right-hand the farmhouse portion, which seems, by the evidence of some carving on the gable, to have been partly rebuilt in 1651, and on the left the parish church, surmounted by an eccentric belfry, greatly resembling a dovecote. The interior of this extraordinary and exceedingly diminutive church—one of the smallest in England—is a close-packed mass of timbering and old-fashioned, high, box-like Georgian pews. A little churchyard surrounds church and farmhouse, and in the background are the tree-covered hills that completely enclose this well-named village of “Dale,” an agricultural outpost of Derbyshire, on the very edge of the coal-mining and ironworks districts of Nottinghamshire.

Should the ancient hermit, whose picturesquely situated, but damp, cave on the hillside used to be shown to visitors, be ever suffered in spirit to return to his rheumaticky cell, I think he would find the scenery of Dale much the same as of old, but from his eyrie he would perceive a strange thing: a gigantic cone-shaped mountain in the near neighbourhood, with spouts and tongues of fire flickering at its crest: a thing that fully realises the idea of a volcano. This is the immense slag-heap of the ironworks at Stanton-by-Dale, impressive even to the modern beholder.

Of Dale Abbey itself, few fragments are left: only the tall gable containing the east window standing up gaunt and empty in a meadow, and sundry stone walls of cottages and outhouses, revealing that once proud house.

The “Falcon” at Bidford, near Stratford-on-Avon, associated with Shakespeare, is now a private house, and the once busy rural “Windmill” inn at North Cheriton, on the cross-country coach-road between Blandford and Wincanton, retired from business forty years ago. It is remarkable for having attached to it a tennis-court, originally designed for the entertainment of customers in general and of coach-passengers in particular. Waiting there for the branch-coach, travellers whiled away the weary hours in playing the old English game of tennis.

THE “BELL” INN, DALE ABBEY.

Perhaps the finest of the inns that are inns no more was the famous “Castle” inn at Marlborough. It was certainly the finest hostelry on the Bath Road, as the inquisitive in such things may yet see by exploring the older building of Marlborough College. For that was the aristocratic “Castle” until 1841, when the Great Western Railway was opened to Bath and Bristol, and so knocked the bottom out of all the coaching and the licensed-victualling business between London and those places.

THE “WINDMILL,” NORTH CHERITON.

I have termed the “Castle” ‘aristocratic,’ and not without due reason. The site was originally occupied by the great castle of Marlborough, whose origin itself goes back to the remotenesses and vaguenesses of early British times, before history began to be. The great prehistoric mound that (now covered with trees) still darkens the very windows of the modern college buildings was first selected by the savage British as the site of a fortress, and is in fact the “bergh” that figures as “borough” in the second half of the place-name. From the earliest times the Mound was regarded with awe and reverence, and was the centre of the wild legends that made Marlborough “Merleberg” or “Merlin’s town”: home of the great magician of Arthurian legend. Those legends had never any foundation in fact, and even the otherwise credulous antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dismiss them as ridiculous, but the crest surmounting the town arms still represents the Mound, and a Latin motto dedicatory to “the bones of the wise Merlin” accompanies it.

The mediÆval castle of Marlborough that arose at the foot of this early stronghold gave place to a splendid mansion built by Francis, Lord Seymour, in time for the reception of Charles the Second, who halted here on one of his progresses to the West. This was partly rebuilt and greatly enlarged in the time of William the Third, and then assumed very much the appearance still worn by the main building of the present College. In or about 1740 the great mansion became the residence of Lady Hertford, under whose rule the grounds were planted with formal groves of limes and set about with yews trimmed into fantastic shapes, and further adorned with terrace-walks and grottoes, intended to be romantic. She converted the spot into a modish Arcadia, after the ideals of her time; and fashionables posed and postured there in the guise of Watteau nymphs or old Chelsea china-ware shepherds and shepherdesses, and imagined they were being rural and living the Simple Life when, in fact, they were being most artificial. The real Wiltshire peasantry, the true flesh-and-blood shepherds and shepherdesses of the surrounding wind-swept downs, who lived hardly upon rye bread and dressed in russet and homespun woollens, looked with astonishment, as well they might, upon such folk, and were not unnaturally amazed when they saw fine ladies with short skirts, silken stockings and high-heeled shoes, carrying dainty shepherds’ crooks tied with cherry-coloured ribbons, leading pet lambs combed and curled and scented, and decorated with satin rosettes. Those Little Bo-Peeps and their cavaliers, dressed out in equally fine feathers, were visions quite outside their notions of sheep-tending.

Here my lady entertained great literary folk, among them Thomson of The Seasons, and here, in one of the sacred Arcadian grottoes, he and my lord were found drunk, and Thomson thereafter lost favour; was, in fact, thrust forth in haste and with contumely. This, my brethren, it is to love punch too well!

Something of my lady’s artificial pleasance still survives, although greatly changed, in the lawns and the trees, now grown very reverend, upon which the south front of the old mansion looks; but in some eleven years after her time, when the property came to the Dukes of Northumberland, the building was leased to a Mr. Cotterell, an innkeeper, who in 1751 opened what had until then been “Seymour House” as a first-class hostelry, under the style and title of the “Castle” inn. In that year Lady Vere tells how she lay “at the Castle Inn, opened a fortnight since,” and describing it as a “prodigious large house,” grows indignant at the Duke of Northumberland putting it to such debased uses, and selling many good old pictures to the landlord.

Cotterell apparently left the “Castle” almost as soon as he had entered, for we find another landlord, in the following year, advertising as follows in The Salisbury Journal of August 17th, 1752:

THE “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.

“The quality” loved to linger here on their way to or from “the Bath,” for the inn, with its pictures, much of its old furniture, and its splendid cuisine, was more like a private house than a house of public entertainment. Every one who was any one, and could afford the luxury of the gout and the inevitable subsequent cure of “the Bath,” stayed at the “Castle” on the way to or from their cure: and there was scarce an eighteenth-century name of note whose owner did not inscribe it in the Visitors’ Book of this establishment. Horace Walpole, curiously examining the winding walks the Arcadian Lady Hertford had caused to be made spirally up the sides of the poor old Mound; Chesterfield, meditating polite ways of going to the devil; in short, every great name of that great, but very material, time. Greater than all others was the elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of his greatness and importance he was not only himself adequately aware, but was determined at all costs that others, too, should be fully informed of it. It was in 1762, travelling to London, that he came this way, suffering torments from the gout that all the waters of Bath had failed to cure, and roaring with apprehension whenever a fly buzzed too near his inflamed toes. He was either in no haste to reach home, or else his gout was too severe to prevent him being moved, for he remained for many weeks at the “Castle.” That prolonged stay seems, however, to have been premeditated, for he made it a condition of his staying that the entire staff of the inn should be clothed in his livery, and that he should have the whole place at his own disposal. That was exclusiveness, if you like, and the modern traveller who secures a first-class compartment wholly to himself cuts a very poor, ineffectual figure beside the intolerance of company shown by the great statesman. The proprietor of the “Castle” must have required a large sum, thus to close his house to other custom for so long a time, and to possibly offend more regular patrons. In fact, the fortunes of the “Castle” as an inn ebbed and flowed alarmingly even before the coaching age and coaching inns were threatened with extinction by railways. Early in the ’20’s, the innkeeper was Thomas Cooper, who found the undertaking of maintaining it too much for him, and so removed to Thatcham, where he became proprietor of the “Cooper Company” coaches. Cooper, however, was not a fortunate man, and coaching eventually landed him in the Bankruptcy Court. He lived his last years as the first station-master at the Richmond station of the London and South-Western Railway.

In 1842, when the road, as an institution, was at an end, the “Castle” was without a tenant, for no one was mad enough to entertain the thought of taking a new lease of it as an inn, and the house was much too large to be easily let for private occupation. At that time a site, and if possible a suitable building also, were being sought by a number of influential persons for the purpose of founding a cheap school for the sons of the clergy: and here was discovered the very place to fit their ideal. The neighbourhood was rural and select, and was so far removed from any disturbing influence that the nearest railway-station was a dozen miles away, at Swindon: the site was extensive and the building large, handsome, and convenient. Here, accordingly, what is now Marlborough College was opened, with two hundred boys, in August, 1843.

Many changes have taken place since then. The original red-brick mansion, designed by Inigo Jones or by his son-in-law, Webb, stands yet, but is neighboured by many new blocks of scholastic buildings, and the enormously large courtyard which in the old days looked upon the Bath Road, and was a place of evolution for post-chaises and coaches, is planted with an avenue, down whose leafy alley you see the striking pillared entrance of what was successively mansion and inn. Inside they show you what was once the bar, a darkling little cubicle of a place, now used as a masters’ lavatory, and a noble oak staircase of astonishingly substantial proportions, together with a number of fine rooms.

GARDEN FRONT, “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.

It was at the “excellent inn at Chapel House,” on the read to Worcester and Lichfield, that Dr. Johnson, in 1776, was led by the comfort of his surroundings to hold forth to Boswell upon “the felicity of England in its taverns and inns”; triumphing over the French for not having in any perfection the tavern life.

The occasion was one well calculated to arouse enthusiasm for the well-known comforts of the old-time English hostelry. He had come, with the faithful Boswell, by post-chaise from Oxford, on the way to Birmingham; it was the inclement season of spring, the way was long, and the wind, blowing across the bleak Oxfordshire downs, was cold. Welcome, then, the blazing fire of the “Shakespeare’s Head”—for that was the real name of the house—and doubly welcome that dinner for which they had halted. Can we wonder that the worthy Doctor was eloquent? I think not. “There is no private house,” said he, “in which people can enjoy themselves so well as in a capital tavern.... No man but a very impudent dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it were his own; whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome; and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is provided as by a good tavern or inn.”

The “Chapel House” inn took its name from a wayside chapel formerly standing here, anciently belonging to the neighbouring Priory of Cold Norton. At a later period, when education began to spread and the roads were travelled by scholars and others on their way to and from Oxford, Brasenose College took over the conduct of it, both as an oratory and a guest-house for the succour of wayfarers along these then unenclosed and absolutely lonely downs. A priest was maintained here until 1547. Afterwards the site seems to have been occupied by a mansion built by William Fitzalan, of Over Norton: a house that gave place in its turn to the inn.

Few ever knew “Chapel House” inn by its real name. It doubtless obtained the title from surviving traditions of Shakespeare having partaken of the hospitality of the old guest-house, on his journeys between Stratford-on-Avon and London. It is, indeed, singular how such traditions survive in this neighbourhood, the “Crown” at Oxford being traditionally the successor of the house where Shakespeare usually inned, and an old Elizabethan mansion at Grendon Underwood, formerly an inn, a halting-place when he chose another route and went by that village and Aylesbury to London.

But guests at “Chapel House” no more knew the inn as the “Shakespeare’s Head” than travellers on the Exeter Road would have recognised “Winterslow Hut” by its proper title of the “Pheasant.” And now the great coaching- and posting-inn has gone the way of all those other inns and taverns where Doctor Johnson—that greatest of Samuels since the patriarch—genuinely dined and supped and drank. Sad it is to think that all the festive shrines frequented by him to whom a tavern chair was “the throne of human felicity” have disappeared, and that only inns that were contemporary with him, and would have Johnsonian associations had he ever entered them, survive to trade on that slender thread of might-have-been.

As usual with the fine old roadside hostelries of this class, the coming of the railway spelled ruin for it. The great house shrank, as it were, into itself; its fires of life burnt low, the outer rooms became empty of furniture, of carpets, of everything save memories. The stable-yards grew silent; grass sprouted between the cobbles, spiders wreathed the windows in webs; the very rats, with tears in their eyes for the vanished days of plenteous corn and offal, were reduced to eating one another, and the last representative died of starvation, with “sorrow’s crown of sorrow”—which we know to be the remembrance of happier days—embittering his last moments.

Why did not some student of social changes record intimately the last lingering days of the “Chapel House” inn: why did no artist make a pictorial record of it for us? It decayed, just as, centuries earlier, the “Chapel” had done from which its name derived, stone by stone and brick by brick, and there was none to record, in literature or in art, the going of it. All we know is that it ceased in 1850 to be an inn, that the remains of the house long stood untenanted; that the dependent buildings became labourers’ cottages, and that the stables have utterly vanished.

“CHAPEL HOUSE” INN.What is “Chapel House” to-day? You come along the lonely road, across the ridge of the downs, from Oxford, and find, just short of the cross-roads to Stratford-on-Avon and Birmingham, to Banbury or Cirencester, past where a milestone says “Oxford 18, Stratford-on-Avon 21, and Birmingham 43 miles,” a group of some ten stone-built cottages, five on either side of the road, with the remains of the inn itself on the right, partly screened from observation by modern shrubberies. A porticoed doorway is pointed out as the former entrance to the tap, and the present orchard in the rear is shown as the site of the greater part of the inn, once extending over that ground in an L-shape. The house is now in use as a kind of country boarding-house, where “paying-guests,” who come for the quiet and the keen, bracing air of these heights, are received.

For the quietude of the place! How cynical a reverse of fortune, that the busiest spot on the London, Oxford and Birmingham Road, where sixty coaches rolled by daily, and where innumerable post-chaises changed horses, should sink thus into slumber! The thought of such a change would, seventy years ago, have been inconceivable; just as unthinkable as that Clapham Junction of to-day should ever become a rural spot for picnics and the plucking of primroses.

A curious feature in the story of “Chapel House” inn is that a small portion of the house has in recent times been rebuilt, for the better accommodation of present visitors. In the course of putting in the foundations some relics of the old chapel were unearthed, in the shape of stone coffins, bones, a silver crucifix, and some beads.

When evening draws in and the last pallid light in the sky glints on the old casements of the wayside cottages of “Chapel House,” or in the dark avenue, the spot wears a solemn air, and seems to exhale Romance.

London inns retired from business are, as may be supposed, comparatively few. A curious example is to be found under the shadow of St. Alban, Holborn, in “White Hart” Yard, between Gray’s Inn Road and Brooke Street. It is the last fragment of an old galleried building, presumably once the “White Hart,” but now partly occupied by a dairyman and a maker of packing-cases. Local history is silent as to the story of the place.

Of all converted inns, there is probably no stranger case than that of the “Edinburgh Castle.” It is not old, nor was it really and truly, in the hearty, hospitable sense, an inn, although the landlord doubtless was included in the all-comprising and often deceptive category of “licensed victuallers,” who very generally do not victual you. The “Edinburgh Castle” was, in short, a great flaring London gin-palace in Limehouse. It has been described by a journalist addicted above his fellows to superlatives—the equivalent in literature of nips of brandy “neat”—as “one of the flashiest, most flaunting, sin-soaked dens in London,” which is just so much nonsense. It was, however, a public-house on a large scale, and did a big trade. It was ornate, in the vulgar, gilded public-house way, and not what can properly be styled a “den.”

“WHITE HART” YARD.

Those curious in conversions may easily see to-day what the “Edinburgh Castle” was like, for its outward look is unchanged, and many an old frequenter, come back from foreign climes—or perhaps only from H.M. Prison on Dartmoor—shoulders his way in at the old familiar doors and calls for his “four ’arf,” or his “two o’ brandy,” before he becomes aware of the essential change that has come over the place. No more booze does he get at the “Edinburgh Castle”: only coffee, tea, or the like—which do not come under that head. The “Edinburgh Castle” has indeed been acquired by the Barnardo Homes for the “People’s Mission Church.”

There are excuses for the mistake often made by old patrons, for the idea of the management is to entice them in, in the hope of reforming them. But if those old customers were at all observant they would at once perceive, and make due deductions from, the odd change in the sign that still, as of yore, is upheld on its old-fashioned post by the kerbstone. Instead of proclaiming that So-and-So’s Fine Ales are sold at the “Edinburgh Castle,” it now reads: “No drunkards shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

The sham mediÆvalism of this castellated house is a mean affair of grey plaster, but the interior of the great building is surprisingly well appointed. Mission services alternate with concerts and entertainments for the people and drill-exercises for the Barnardo boys. The ex-public-house is, in fact, whatever it may look like from without, a centre whence a measure of sweetness and light is dispensed in an intellectually starved purlieu.