The memory of Pope has already given splendour to the Bath road; two miles. beyond Calcott, it is graced by the memory of his most delightful heroine. At Ufton Nervet lived Arabella Fermor, the Belinda of "The Rape of the Lock." Arabella must have passed down the road many a time on her way from Ufton to Hampton Court,

"Where mighty Anna, whom three realms obey, Doth sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea,"

perhaps in the society of her celebrator; for Pope himself was frequently a visitor at Ufton, many of his most delightful letters are dated from there, letters in which he gives charming sketches of English country life in the last century, and paints the old house for us, with its haunted staircase, secret chambers, formal gardens, and the raised terrace behind it where Arabella must often have walked. Bucklebury, in the immediate neighbourhood, is associated with even greater names. This was the country seat of Bolingbroke the magnificent. Here the great statesman who was half Horace and half the elder Pitt, forgot the distractions of political intrigue in the smiles of Burgundy, and the calm pleasures of country life. Bucklebury was his Sabine farm. Here he played the fancy farmer and gathered round him the finest intellects of the day. Swift was a constant visitor, and in a very delightful letter to Stella, he has drawn Mr. Secretary for us as the perfect country gentleman, smoking his tobacco with one or two neighbours, inquiring after the wheat in such a field, visiting his hounds and calling them all by their names, he and his wife showing Swift up to his bed room just in the country fashion. "His house," writes the author of Gulliver, "is just in the midst of 3,000l. a year, he had by his lady, who is descended from Jack of Newbury of whom books and ballads are written; and there is an old picture of him in the room."

At Woolhampton a little over ten miles from Reading still stands all that is left of the Angel, a celebrated old posting inn, with a most curious sign, and three miles five

furlongs further on is Thatcham. Here the passengers by the "New Company's elegant light four inside post coaches," which in the palmy days of coaching did the hundred and five miles from Bath to London in twelve hours and a half, used to dine at the King's Head. Here prodigies in the way of taking in provisions were performed in half-an-hour. The attack on the table must have been tremendous, and the tables were well fortified for the attack. These were the days, be it remembered when English cookery was English cookery, unpolluted as yet with

""Tis a delightful sound. And what a dinner! What a profusion of substantial delicacies! What mighty and iris-tinted

rounds of beef! What vast and marbleveined ribs! What gelatinous veal pies! What colossal hams! Those are evidently prize cheeses! And how invigorating is the perfume of those various and variegated pickles! Then the bustle emulating the plenty; the ringing of bells, the clash of thoroughfare, the summoning of ubiquitous waiters, and the all-pervading feeling of omnipotence from the guests, who order what they please to the landlord, who can produce and execute everything they can desire. 'Tis a wondrous sight!"

Three miles further on and we are at Newbury, or rather at Speenhamland, a kind of suburb of inns and posting houses which connected it with the Bath Road, and at Newbury, and indeed right on to Hungerford, we are on historic ground. It is out of my province to describe in detail the rise and fall of the fortunes of the fight during those two tremendous days September 16th, 1643, and October 27th, 1644, when the best blood of England was poured out like water on Speen Hill, and the cause of Charles the First was upheld by an uncertain triumph; nor have I space to do more than make passing mention of the famous personages in the world of history, romance and letters, whose memories throng the road as far as Hungerford, and indeed beyond it, "thick as leaves on Vallambrosa." I see Charles the First dressing in the bow window of the drawing room of Shaw House on the morning of the battle, and the divinity that hedges a king

that he would be out of that misery before night; I see the travellers on the Bath Road smacking their lips over the Pelican dinners, and losing their colour over the Pelican bill, each equally notorious at that great house.

"The famous inn at Speenhamland
That stands below the hill,
May well be called the Pelican
From its enormous bill,"

as Quin sang of it. On the 16th of June, 1668, Mr. Samuel Pepys came to "Newberry," as he spells it, and there dined "and musick: a song of the old courtier of Queene Elizabeth's and how he was changed upon the coming in of the King did please me mightily, and I did cause W. Hewer to write it out. Then comes the reckoning (forced to change gold) 88. 7d. servants, and poor 1s. 6d. So out and lost our way; but come into it again." I do

not see Chaucer writing the Canterbury Tales under the oak named after him in Donnington Park, because, in spite of the tradition that says he did so, the Park did not come into the family's possession till eighteen years after the poet's death, but I can see Burke, and Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Reynolds posting along the road towards Sandford, where they are going to stay with Mrs. Montagu, and I can see Evelyn eating "troutes" at Hungerford, and William of Orange receiving the commissioners of King James. This important episode in the Rebellion is graphically described by Macaulay:

"On the morning of Saturday, 8th of December, 1688, the King's commissioners reached Hungerford. reached Hungerford. The Prince's bodyguard was drawn up to receive them with military respect. Bentinck welcomed them

and proposed to conduct them immediately to his master. They expressed a hope that the Prince would favour them with a private audience; but they were informed that he had resolved to hear them and answer them in public. They were ushered into his bed chamber where they found him surrounded by a crowd of noblemen and gentlemen. Halifax, whose rank, age and abilities entitled him to precedence, was spokesman. Halifax having explained the basis on which he and his colleagues were prepared to treat, put into William's hand a letter from the King and retired. William opened the letter and seemed unusually moved. It was the first letter which he had received from his fatherin-law since they had become avowed enemies. He requested the Lords and Gentlemen whom he had convoked on this occasion to consult together unrestrained

by his presence as to the answer which ought to be returned. To himself, however, he reserved the power of deciding in the last resort after hearing their opinion. He then left them and retired to Littlecote Hall, a manor house, situated about two miles off, and renowned down to our own times not more on acccout of its venerable architecture and furniture than on account of a horrible and mysterious crime which was perpetrated there in the days of the Tudors."

The dreadful atrocity to which Macaulay here refers and the sinister rumours which connect it with the name of Wild Darrell, the then owner of Littlecote, have stamped themselves too luridly on the popular mind to be passed over lightly. I shall deal with the legend of Littlecote at some length; for it is the most romantic episode of the road.

W. OUTRAM TRISTRAM.

I.

GULL-FLEET.

HE river Colne, once upon a time, was seized with the desire of being a second Nile. We are speaking of course of that præhistoric age in which imagination runs riot, and sets down all its fancies

as facts. The Nile brings down mud which it deposits over the surface of Egypt, and fertilises it. Mud! thought the Colne, I can do a neat thing in mud. I can beat the Nile in the amount of slimy material I can bring on my waters and cast down where my waters reach. But it was not in mud that the Nile was to be equalled and excelled. A delta! thought the Colne. I can delticulate-a præhistoric verb and passable into any number of mouths. Then the Colne proceeded near its embouchure to ramify in various directions, like a fan. But the attempt proved a failure, and in the end the Colne was forced to find her way to the sea through a single channel out of the many abortive ones she had run, leaving these latter some longer, some shorter, all smothering themselves in mud, and annually contracting. The Colne in the world of rivers is an instance of great pretence and poor execution, and has its counterpart in the world of men.

Crafty millers have cast their eyes on these channels, and have run dams across their extremities with sluices in them, and when the tide flows into the creeks and flushes them full, it pours up through the sluice gate and brims the basin beyond; but when the water tries to return with the ebb, No, no, says the miller, you come as you will, you go as I choose! The trap is shut, and the water is caught and allowed to run away as the

miller orders, and is made to turn a wheel and grind corn before it goes.

That water, as it trickles down the empty channel blushing brown with humiliation, finds that channel which erewhile was an arm of green and glittering water, deteriorated into a gulf of ill-savoured ooze, alive with gulls chattering, leaping, fluttering, arguing, gobbling.

At the mouth of the Colne, and yet not on it, nor on the sea, but lost and entangled among the creeks that end in mud-smother, lies the port of Brightlingsea. The name

it takes from its first settler, Brit-helm, the Dane with the bright helmet, by which he was known, who ran his boat across an arm of sea, and squatted on what was then an island. It was Brithelm's Isle; but now it is no more an island. One long creek runs past it for several miles eastward to St. Osyth's Priory, and almost reaches the ocean, perhaps at one day it may have done so. Another, in an opposite direction, cuts across the land to the Maldon river, and actually reaches the great bay of the Blackwater, so that in its mid channel the tides meet, and strike each other in their wavelets angrily. And again, another above Brightlingsea runs behind the little port and tries to reach the sea, and did reach it in historic times, but is now stopped by a causeway and a miller's dam. That road marks the spot where Brithelm's boat crossed in ancient days. later times a causeway was carried over on piles driven into the ooze, and then the sea began to choke itself at the extremity, and to deposit banks of mud behind the causeway, which finally became dry land, and so Britheim's Isle ceased to be an isle.

In

Nowadays, it is along this road that the Brightlingsea people have to go when they drive or walk to the market town of Colchester, and a very long détour it obliges them to make. When a railway was run by