chimneys remaining, a gem with a crocketed and pinnacled canopy, was
taken down some thirty years ago, while the Priory is said to be in
danger of being pulled down, though a later report speaks only of its
restoration. In the coaching age the town was alive with traffic, and
Burford races, established by the Merry Monarch, brought it much
gaiety. At the George Inn, now degraded from its old estate and cut up
into tenements, Charles I stayed. It was an inn for more than a
century before his time, and was only converted from that purpose
during the early years of the nineteenth century, when the proprietor
of the Bull Inn bought it up and closed its doors to the public with a
view to improving the prosperity of his own house. The restoration of
the picturesque almshouses founded by Henry Bird in the time of the
King-maker, a difficult piece of work, was well carried out in the
decadent days of the "twenties," and happily they do not seem to have
suffered much in the process.

[Illustration: The George Inn, Burford, Oxon]

During our wanderings in the streets and lanes of rural England we
must not fail to visit the county of Essex. It is one of the least
picturesque of our counties, but it possesses much wealth of
interesting antiquities in the timber houses at Colchester, Saffron
Walden, the old town of Maldon, the inns at Chigwell and Brentwood,
and the halls of Layer Marney and Horsham at Thaxted. Saffron Walden
is one of those quaint agricultural towns whose local trade is a thing
of the past. From the records which are left of it in the shape of
prints and drawings, the town in the early part of the nineteenth
century must have been a medieval wonder. It is useless now to rail
against the crass ignorance and vandalism which has swept away so many
irreplaceable specimens of bygone architecture only to fill their