events, it was odd that I had more than once promised myself a
visit to the very village I was approaching solely because
William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now
no thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in
my mind.

Arrived at the village I went straight to the "George and
Dragon," where a friend had assured me I could always find
good accommodations. But he was wrong: there was no room for
me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old
woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She appeared to resent
it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time,
when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms
available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her:
couldn't she direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed?
No, she couldn't--it is always so; but after the third time of
asking she unfroze so far as to say that perhaps they would
take me in at a cottage close by. So I went, and a poor kind
widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up. She
made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself
before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on
the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a
cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and
wainscoting. "Do you call this a cottage?" I said to the
woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have it as a cottage,
but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she returned.
Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This
then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay
seventy or eighty years ago," I said. She had never heard of
William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been