A civil tramp—Country hospitality—Sleaford—A Lincolnshire saying—A sixteenth-century vicarage—Struck by lightning—"The Queen of Villages"—A sculptured anachronism—Swineshead—A strange legend—Local proverbs—Chat with a "commercial"—A mission of destruction—The curfew—Lost our way—Out of the beaten track—A grotesque figure and mysterious legend—Puzzling inscriptions—The end of a long day.
Journeying leisurely on we presently arrived at the curiously entitled village of Silk Willoughby; here again on asking the name of the place, which we did before consulting our map, a native shortened it to Silkby. It is a marked tendency of the age to contract the spelling and the pronunciation of names to an irreducible minimum,—a tendency that I have already remarked upon. Well, perhaps for everyday speech, Silk Willoughby is rather overlong, and the more concise Silkby serves all needful purposes. Still this pronouncing of names differently from what they are spelt on the map is sometimes inconvenient to the stranger, as the natives have become so accustomed to the abbreviated expression that the full title of a place, given precisely as on the map, is occasionally unfamiliar to them, and they will declare hopelessly that they "never heard of no such
