country building and the begrimed appearance of a smoke-stained London dwelling. Age adds beauty to the one; it adds but a depressing gloom to the other.
PRE-RAILWAY TRAVELLERS Right in front of us, at the top of the market-*place, stood a fine example of an old coaching inn—a long red-brick structure whose ruddy front showed in pleasant contrast with the gray stone buildings around of earlier date: a plain but comfortable-*looking hostelry, its many windows gleaming cheerfully in the sunshine, and having in the centre under the eaves of its roof a reminder of the past in the shape of a sun-dial with a legend upon it; but what that legend was we could not make out, for time and weather had rendered it indistinct. In our mind's eye we pictured to ourselves the outside travellers by the arriving coaches consulting it, and then pulling their cumbersome "verge" watches out of their fobs to see if they were correct. Sun-dials, besides being picturesque, were of real utility in the days when watches and clocks could not always be relied upon to tell the right time.
Of old, Falkingham was on the high turnpike road from London to Lincoln, therefore the traffic passing through the little town in the coaching age must have been considerable, and the place must have presented a very different aspect then from the one of slumberous tranquillity it now possesses. Our inn, "The Greyhound" to wit, I find duly recorded in my copy of Paterson as supplying post-horses. I well remember my grandfather expatiating upon the pleasures of a driving tour in his
