y Lords
Minchampstead and Vieuxbois, not without Mark Armsworth's help, to its
ancient beauty of grey flint and white clunch chequer-work, and quaint
wooden spire. Pleasant churchyard round it, where the dead lie looking
up to the bright southern sun, among huge black yews, upon their knoll
of white chalk above the ancient stream. Pleasant white wooden bridge,
with its row of urchins dropping flints upon the noses of elephantine
trout, or fishing over the rail with crooked pins, while hapless
gudgeon come dangling upward between stream and sky, with a look
of sheepish surprise and shame, as of a school-boy caught stealing
apples, in their foolish visages. Pleasant new national schools at
the bridge end, whither the urchins scamper at the sound of the two
o'clock bell. Though it be an ugly pile enough of bright red brick, it
is doing its work, as Whitbury folk know well by now. Pleasant, too,
though still more ugly, those long red arms of new houses which
Whitbury is stretching out along its fine turnpikes,--especially up
to the railway station beyond the bridge, and to the smart new hotel,
which hopes (but hopes in vain) to outrival the ancient "Angler's
Rest." Away thither, and not to the Railway Hotel, they trundle in a
fly--leaving Mark Armsworth all but angry because they will not sleep,
as well as breakfast, lunch, and dine with him daily,--and settle
in the good old inn, with its three white gables overhanging the
pavement, and its long lattice window buried deep beneath them,
like--so Stangrave says--to a shrewd kindly eye under a bland white
forehead.

No, good old inn; not such shall be thy fate, as long as trout are
trout, and men have wit to catch them. For art thou not a sacred
house? Art thou not consecrate to the Whitbury brotherhood of anglers!
Is not the wainscot of that long low parlour inscribed with many a
famous name? Are not its walls hung with many a famous countenance?
Has not its oak-ribbed ceiling rung, for now a hundred years, to the
laughter of painters, sculptors, grave divines (unbending at least
there), great lawyers, statesmen, wits, even of Foote and Quin
themselves; while the sleek landlord wiped the cobwebs off another
magnum of that grand old port, and took in all the wisdom with a quiet
twinkle of his sleepy eye? He rests now, good old man, among the yews
beside his forefathers; and on his tomb his lengthy epitaph, writ by
himself; for Barker was a poet in his way.

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