At the other extremity of the town, down by Girdlestone Grange, an old
moated residence where the squire's family have resided these four
centuries past, we are full fifty years behind our modern neighbors.
Here stands our famous old "King's-head Inn," a well-known place of
resort so early as the reign of Elizabeth. The great oak beside the
porch is as old as the house itself; and on the windows of a little
disused parlor overlooking the garden may still be seen the names of
Sedley, Rochester and other wits of the Restoration. They scrawled those
autographs after dinner, most likely, with their diamond rings, and went
reeling afterwards, arm-in-arm, along the village street, singing and
swearing, and eager for adventures--as gentlemen were wont to be in
those famous old times when they drank the king's health more freely
than was good for their own.

Not far from the "King's Head," and almost hidden by the trees which
divide it from the road, stands an ancient charitable institution called
the College--quadrangular, mullion-windowed, many-gabled, and colonized
by some twenty aged people of both sexes. At the back of the college,
adjoining a space of waste ground and some ruined cloisters, lies the
churchyard, in the midst of which, surrounded by solemn yews and
mouldering tombs, stands the Priory Church. It is a rare old church,
founded, according to the county history, in the reign of Edward the
Confessor, and entered with a full description in Domesday Book. Its
sculptured monuments and precious brasses, its Norman crypt, carved
stalls and tattered banners drooping over faded scutcheons, tell all of
generations long gone by, of noble families extinct, of gallant deeds
forgotten, of knights and ladies remembered only by the names above
their graves. Amongst these, some two or three modest tablets record the
passing away of several generations of my own predecessors--obscure
professional men for the most part, of whom some few became soldiers and