Friar's Oak is in a dip of the Downs, and the forty-third milestone
between London and Brighton lies on the skirt of the village. It is
but a small place, with an ivied church, a fine vicarage, and a row
of red-brick cottages each in its own little garden. At one end was
the forge of Champion Harrison, with his house behind it, and at the
other was Mr. Allen's school. The yellow cottage, standing back a
little from the road, with its upper story bulging forward and a
crisscross of black woodwork let into the plaster, is the one in
which we lived. I do not know if it is still standing, but I should
think it likely, for it was not a place much given to change.

Just opposite to us, at the other side of the broad, white road, was
the Friar's Oak Inn, which was kept in my day by John Cummings, a
man of excellent repute at home, but liable to strange outbreaks
when he travelled, as will afterwards become apparent. Though there
was a stream of traffic upon the road, the coaches from Brighton
were too fresh to stop, and those from London too eager to reach
their journey's end, so that if it had not been for an occasional
broken trace or loosened wheel, the landlord would have had only the
thirsty throats of the village to trust to. Those were the days
when the Prince of Wales had just built his singular palace by the
sea, and so from May to September, which was the Brighton season,
there was never a day that from one to two hundred curricles,
chaises, and phaetons did not rattle past our doors. Many a summer
evening have Boy Jim and I lain upon the grass, watching all these
grand folk, and cheering the London coaches as they came roaring
through the dust clouds, leaders and wheelers stretched to their
work, the bugles screaming and the coachmen with their low-crowned,
curly-brimmed hats, and their faces as scarlet as their coats. The