An inn of the old-fashioned sort—A chat with "mine host"—A weird experience—Ghost stories—An ancient rectory house—A quaint interior—A haunted passage—Lost in a fog—The game of bowls—An old posting bill—The siege of Alton church—Ants as weather prophets.

At Beaconsfield I put up for the night at "The White Hart," an ancient and homely hostelry where I found comfortable quarters, a landlord both interesting and obliging, a waitress civil and attentive, and excellent fare: such was my accidental good fortune. "The White Hart" is a very ancient though much altered building, dating, I was informed, from the days of Elizabeth; certainly some of its big and shaped beams upstairs testify to its ancientness. The coaching days were the days of its prime, for then one hundred horses were stabled there—so I afterwards learnt. The landlord received me with a cheery smile at the door: he knew how to welcome a guest. I casually told him I was tired and hungry, for I had travelled far that day; then he must needs at once concern himself about my dinner, so that I might not have to wait unduly for it, and promised me the best that the town could supply. I explained to him I was not an exacting traveller; he was far more anxious about my comfort and my fare than was I. That is the sort of landlord for me: very different his welcome to that one generally receives from the stony-eyed manager of a modern hotel. At these old-fashioned inns, with their friendly, good-natured landlords (for the one seems always to go with the other), I, but a tweed-clad, dust-stained traveller, always feel quite at home and at ease; there is such a charming simplicity and do-as-you-will air about them. Were I a millionaire I would choose them in preference to all others and desire no better. I merely sought a night's shelter, and however humble my chamber, if clean, it satisfied me. These inns give you their best, and who but the surliest could grumble at that when good is the best? I am an unpretending road-farer, though I fare in a car. I do not care to discuss my dinners when I get them; some days I made do with a tea, I found it more refreshing, but the dinner provided for me at that little inn of no pretence consisted of soup, fish, fowl, sweet omelette, with cheese to follow. Perhaps my hunger, begotten of a long day in fresh air, gave me an extra zest, but I thought at the time that never had I sat down to a better cooked dinner—I have certainly sat down to a worse in a wealthy man's house. This much for my modest inn I must say. Indeed, on the strength of its goodness I indulged in a small bottle of wine, and the wine was no worse than that of the same sort I have had at expensive London hotels at double the price, or perhaps even more.

It chanced that I was the only guest there that night, so the landlord, with kind intent, came to me after dinner and entertained me with a chat, and I was well entertained. It turned out that he was an old "'Varsity" man, a magistrate, an enthusiastic antiquary, a churchwarden, a mason, and I know not what else besides, a man of many parts; and if he played his other parts as well as he played that of "mine host," he played them well indeed. His knowledge was wide, he talked of many things and interestingly, so I spent a very pleasant and profitable evening in his company over a glass and a pipe. I quite forgot my tiredness; it was late before I got to bed—that speaks well for mine host. Our gossip eventually took an antiquarian turn; he told me of a very ancient, rambling, timber-framed rectory house that stood against the churchyard, which he said I really ought to see, and he kindly offered to show me over it the next morning. This ancient rectory, I understood, was built on the site of an old nunnery and dated from about 1525, and is in part inhabited—I think by the town nurse, he said. Connected with it, he told me of a most strange experience of his, and this is the tale he told to me after some hesitation. "I hardly like to relate my experience," he said, "for you may possibly not credit me, but I tell you the absolute truth." Then he paused as though doubtful if he should continue; indeed he needed some persuasion to do so. But I prevailed on him. What was the strange story he had to tell, I wondered, that he should so hesitate to tell it? I bided my time, and at last he went on: "I was going over the old building one morning, as I sometimes do. Believe me, I am a perfectly sane man, not given to fancies; I was in perfect health at the time, thinking of nothing special in particular. I was going over the building, as I said, and I opened the door of one of the rooms expecting to find it empty as usual. To my surprise I saw a strange clergyman seated there reading a book; being a stranger I took a good look at him, for I wondered who he was, but he neither moved nor spoke, so I left the room, quietly shutting the door. In the passage outside I met an inhabitant of the place. I described the clergyman to him, and asked him who he could be. The man looked at me in some astonishment; then he exclaimed, 'Why, from your description he exactly resembles our late rector, but he has been dead these three years.' Then I went back to the room again; the door had not been opened, I was close to it, and there was no other mode of egress, yet when I entered no one was there, the chair was vacant. For the moment I hardly knew what to think; a queer sort of feeling came over me, for I was suddenly conscious that it must have been the ghost of the late rector I saw. If not, what was it? How came that figure seated there? to where had it disappeared? I did not even know in the least what the dead rector was like, yet the description of what I saw was at once recognised for him by one who had known him well. I had never believed in ghosts, was not at the time thinking about them—indeed I had never previously given them a thought. Such was my strange experience, for which I can give no reasonable explanation." No more could I.

The landlord's story did not disturb my rest that night, though I slept in a very ancient chamber, but it set me a-thinking. Ghosts and ghost stories appear to be coming into favour and fashion again, even taken seriously, it seems, from the accounts I read in the papers and in books. Truly astonishing are some of these. A few years back, under the heading of "A Haunted House," there appeared in the Standard a long letter from an army officer who confessed to having been driven out of a good house by the ghostly manifestations that took place within it! He begins his letter: "In this century ghosts are obsolete, but they are costing me two hundred pounds a year. I have written to my lawyer, but am told by him that the English law does not recognise ghosts." I really cannot blame the law, indeed I commend it. Then he goes on to say: "I am not physically nervous, I have been under fire repeatedly, have been badly wounded in action, and have been complimented on my coolness when bullets were flying about. I was not then afraid of ghosts; besides, I suspected trickery. A light was kept burning in the upper and lower corridor all night. A lamp and loaded revolver were by my bedside every night. No one could have entered the house without being detected, and probably shot." Then he describes the different ghostly manifestations that drove him, family, and servants out of the house: "The governess used to complain of a tall lady, with black, heavy eyebrows, who used to come as if to strangle her as she lay in bed." Footsteps were constantly heard during the night in the corridors. "One night, lying awake, I distinctly saw the handle of my bedroom door turned, and the door pushed open; I seized my revolver and ran to the door. The lamp in the corridor was burning brightly; no one was there, and no one could have got away." On another occasion, when the writer with his family returned home at midnight from a concert, "our old Scotch housekeeper, who admitted us, a woman of iron nerves, was trembling with terror. Shortly before our arrival a horrible shriek had rung through the house. To our questions she only replied, 'It was nothing earthly.' The nurse, who was awake with a child with the whooping-cough, heard the cry, and says it was simply horrible," and so forth. Then I read in A Diplomatist's Wife in Many Lands, by Mrs. Hugh Fraser, how she had frequently seen a ghost in an Italian palace where her husband and self resided for a time. Besides, have we not the extraordinary description not only of ghostly people but of ghostly scenery (the latter is quite a new departure to me) in that astonishing book An Adventure, of which "the Publishers guarantee that the authors have put down what happened to them as faithfully and accurately as was in their power. The signatures appended to the Preface are the only fictitious words in the book." In the Notes from the Life of an Ordinary Mortal, by A. G. C. Liddell, C.B., I read: "In the morning walked with Mr. Chamberlain. We talked about ghosts." So enlightened people do talk about ghosts! "He said that he had at one time been interested in the subject, and had got hold of a case where the ghost had been seen by more than one person at the same time.... Four persons were sitting in an old hall and saw the figure of a monk walk across the far end of the room and disappear. The next night they fixed a rope across the track of the phantom, but it passed through the body without movement." So much for the papers and books, though I have only quoted a few of the incidents recorded; there are many others. Now, besides the landlord of "The White Hart," three other persons of late have declared to me positively that they have seen a ghost. Yet till this, since I was a boy, I have never heard them mentioned. The first was a lady whose husband had taken a charming old house in the Eastern Counties; it had the reputation of being haunted, but, not believing in ghosts, neither she nor her husband thought anything of that; but one evening, when going upstairs to dress for dinner, my informant told me she distinctly saw a figure of a woman, richly attired in a quaint old-world dress, perhaps of the Elizabethan period, quietly walking along the landing, and she watched it till it disappeared in the wall at the end of the passage. All the servants and the guests were accounted for, and "If the figure were not a ghost, what could it have been?" I was asked. I could not say! Moreover, the lady saw the same figure on a further occasion walking and disappearing in just the same astonishing manner. Another lady told me the story of a ghost she had seen in her house, only she said she was so frightened she could not say how it was dressed, or whether it was a he or a she ghost, so I did not trouble about further detail. Now for my last relation, and this occurred in my own house, not an old house by the way, and where I have never heard or dreamt of a ghost. A lady was left a short time in a room, when she rushed out to me in another part of the house declaring that, though the room was empty when she went in and she had shut the door behind her, on suddenly looking up from her chair she saw a bald-headed man standing in front of the fireplace; for a moment she wondered who he could be and how he came there, then the thought came across her it must be a ghost, and she asked me to come and interview it! This I did with her at all speed, but when we returned to the room no one was there. I merely thought the lady must have been dozing, but she stoutly averred she had not. Still, let people say and write on the subject no end, and be hounded out of their houses by ghosts, I will not believe in one till I see it; even then, I think I should send for a doctor to learn if my health were at fault, to be sure that I had not imagined the thing.

The old rectory house at Beaconsfield is built on three sides of a square, and its half-timber front has a picturesque look. Within are many ancient chambers, some with their original panelling and Tudor fireplaces of stone, and there are many passages besides, for it is a rambling place: one of these passages, I was told, is called "The Ghost Walk," because a ghost is often heard at night, though not seen, walking along it; her footsteps, however, are often heard, and the rustling of her dress, for it is supposed to be the ghost of some lady. I think the landlord told me her story, but I have forgotten it now. Rats suggest themselves to me as an explanation of the footsteps, for I will wager there are rats in that old house; imagination might account for the rustling of a dress—it accounts for a good many things in this world. Old houses are often full of strange noises, for panelling is apt to creak with the changes of the weather, and in the still night-time all sounds appear magnified; then the creak of old woodwork seems startlingly loud, for I have experienced this.

My landlord pointed out to me the chamber in which he had seen the vision, but there is nothing remarkable about it except its ancientness. The house is certainly one that should appeal even to the most exacting ghost; any stray ghost out of place through his "haunt" being pulled down would miss a rare opportunity in not taking up his abode there. Some small niches in the sides of the walls were pointed out to me; what use these could have been put to puzzled my antiquarian guide—they were too small and too shallow for statues. It occurred to me that they might be to place lamps in to light the dark passages; the landlord said he had not thought of that, and deemed it a plausible and possible explanation of their purport. I felt complimented he should so esteem my suggestion, but I had seen very similar niches in other old buildings that had undoubtedly been used to contain lamps; I told him this, and then he accepted my view as being correct, though he said many people had seen the niches and were at a loss to account for them.

It was a rare foggy morning when we left Beaconsfield, it was as though the whole country were packed up in cotton-wool; so dense indeed was the mist that we had to drive slowly and cautiously, for ahead of us was a wall of white and our vision was limited to yards. At my hotel in the evening I found a fellow-motorist who did not venture out at all that day, he thought it too risky. However, it was merely a matter of pace, and at times, when the fog thinned a little, we drove along quite comfortably. In a way I even enjoyed the drive, for the country looked so mysterious, and the mist exaggerated the forms of half-hidden things that suddenly rose up before us; even the houses and trees by the way assumed proportions gigantic: we might have been travellers in fabled Brobdingnag.

Shortly after Beaconsfield we got on to narrow winding lanes, then into woods, though we could not see much of them, when we discovered we were at Burnham Beeches, where the roads are kept as prim as those of a park, neatly signposted too, and this robbed the woods of their suggestion of wildness; so on somehow to the main Bath road, which we followed only as far as Maidenhead, where we struck to the left over cross-country roads and eventually turned up at Wokingham, the landscape between being mostly hidden from view. The horn came in useful that day. Then followed some more cross-country roads, out of which we emerged on to the old Exeter highway and soon reached the hamlet of Hook with its old coaching inn—from the notices on its front it now appears to be a motoring inn; and after this we found ourselves back in Odiham again, so we took a fresh road out of it. The fog had now quite cleared away and the sun was shining, but what with a late start and the slow travelling for much of the way, and a long halt for refreshment, the sun was already lowering in the west and the sky was growing golden there. We had a delightful drive through a more or less hilly country into Alton, passing through South Warnborough, a very pretty village—the prettiest in Hampshire, its inhabitants declare. I am glad to learn they take a pride in their village; that is the sort of pride that profits, the pride of place and not of person—to be a dweller in no mean village.

After South Warnborough we had a hilly drive over a down-like undulating country, and then we descended into Alton, where I have an idea they brew good ale. At Alton we put up at "The Swan," an old coaching inn of some former fame, and that still has a pleasantly prosperous look, keeps up its ancient reputation for good cheer, and presents a smiling front to the street. I found a fine bowling-green in the rear, and during the course of the evening some of the townsfolk forgathered there and played bowls quite seriously over their pipes and their ale. It may not be high art, but I noticed there was an art in playing bowls, and the old men who knew and studied it appeared mostly to win. A good old-fashioned game is bowls, that never seems wholly to go out of fashion, and a pleasant one to watch; engrossing too, for even Drake, when playing it on Plymouth Hoe with the dreaded Armada in sight, went on with his rub undisturbed. "There is no hurry," quoth he, and he quietly finished his game and then went and played ball with the Spaniards—but those were the days before steam. Now I never look on at a game of bowls but I think of bold Drake and those easy-going historic old days when, if they did things slowly, they did them very thoroughly.

Writing of the subject of inn gardens, I remember seeing somewhere on the way boldly displayed on the front of an inn the simple legend "Lovely Garden." I am glad to note that innkeepers are becoming aware of the attraction of a garden and so proclaim it: a garden where guests may escape from walled rooms into the fresh air, there to loiter at ease retired from the street and the crowd; to secure a bedroom looking over those gardens is a further attraction to me.

It may be that special good-fortune attended me, but during the whole of my journey never once at my inn where I stopped for the night did I fail to find entertainment, either from host or from guest. I think I have said so before. Now here at "The Swan" was still another landlord both willing to gossip and wishful to entertain a lone wanderer in the smoke-room of his comfortable hostel. He brought me a time-yellowed paper of the seventeenth century having an advertisement of his inn, to show how long it had been in existence. In the same paper, I think it was, my eye caught the following announcement: "June 19th, 1684. The post will go every day, to and from, betwixt London and Epsom during the season for drinking the waters." Then Epsom was a fashionable Spa. Also he showed me an old posting bill of the house that was of some interest, for it was a bill paid by the Rev. Gilbert White for a postchaise from "The Swan" to Meon Stoke and back, when White was on a visit to a friend at that place; and thus the bill runs:—

Harrow.

Hampshire—Alton.

Swan.

Neat Post-Chaises.

August 27th, 1785.

Received the contents.

H. Harrow.

Paid by the Rev. Gilbert White.

In the account of his Hampshire rides in this locality Cobbett thus delightfully refers to Gilbert White: "I forgot to mention that a man who showed me the way told me at a certain fork, 'that road goes to Selbourne.' This puts me in mind of a book that was once recommended to me, but which I never saw, entitled The History and Antiquities of Selbourne (or something of that sort), written, I think, by a parson of the name of White. The parson had, I think, the living of Selbourne." Now had the "parson of the name of White" only written about farming Cobbett might have taken a more intelligent interest in him. Next the landlord remarked, "You ought really to see our old church." (How often have the landlords of inns during my journey recommended me to see their church; even one offered me his pew on a Sunday, such a staunch churchman was he.) "It may interest you," he continued, "for there are still the marks on its walls of the cannon-balls that struck them during the Civil War, when the church was besieged" (still more of Cromwell's endless cannon-balls!), "and there are the bullet marks too on the door made at the same time." The story of this siege is sufficiently and quaintly recorded on a brass in the church, and this I copied as follows:—

A Memoricall

For this renowned Martialist Richard Boles of ye
Right Worshipful family of the Boles. Colonell of a
Ridgment of foot of 1300. Who for his Gratious
King Charles ye First did wonders att the Battell
Of Edge Hill. His last action was at Alton in
This County of Southampton, he was surprised by
Five or six thousand of the Rebells which
Caused him, there Quartered, to fly to the Church
With near Fourescore of his men who there
Fought them six or seuen houers, and when
The Rebells Breaking in upon him, he slew
With his sword six or seuen of them and then
Was slayne himselfe with sixty of his men aboute him.

1641.

His Gratious Soverayne hearing of his death
Give ys passionate Expression "Bring me
A Moorning Scarffe i have lost one of the
Best Commanders in this Kingdome."

Alton will tell you of that Famous Fight
Which ys man made & bade the world good night,
His Verteous life fear'd not mortalyty
His body must, his Vertues cannot die,
Because his Bloud was there so nobly spent,
This is his tombe, the Church his monument.

The next morning, after seeing the church, as I was departing the landlord exclaimed, and that in spite of a fast-falling barometer and a plentiful supply of suspicious clouds about: "You'll have a fine day, for I notice the ants are throwing up their tiny heaps on the bowling-green, and when they do that the day is certain to be fine." I had not heard of this method of prognosticating the weather before; all the same it proved true, excepting for one short shower, when from the look of the sky at the start, and the south-westerly wind that was blowing, I should certainly have expected little but rain; yet even the shower we experienced I found out was local and did not extend very far.