orsham is there. Elsewhere
the town bustles. (I should, however, mention the very picturesque
house--now cottages--on the left of the road as one leaves the station:
as fine a mass of timbers, gables, and oblique lines as one could wish,
making an effect such as time alone can give. The days of such relics
are numbered.)

[Sidenote: HORSHAM STONE]

Horsham not only has beautiful old houses of its own, but it has been
the cause of beautiful old houses all over the county; since nothing so
adds to the charm of a building as a roof of Horsham stone, those large
grey flat slabs on which the weather works like a great artist in
harmonies of moss, lichen, and stain. No roofing so combines dignity and
homeliness, and no roofing except possibly thatch (which, however, is
short-lived) so surely passes into the landscape. But Horsham stone is
no longer used. It is to be obtained for a new house only by the
demolition of an old; and few new houses have rafters sufficiently
stable to bear so great a weight. Our ancestors built for posterity: we
build for ourselves. Our ancestors used Sussex oak where we use fir.

Not only is Horsham stone on the roofs of the neighbourhood: it is also
on the paths, so that one may step from flag to flag for miles, dryshod,
or at least without mud.

Horsham's place in history is unimportant: but indirectly it played its
part in the fourteenth century, by supplying the War Office of that era
with bolts for cross bows, excellent for slaying Scots and Frenchmen.
The town was famous also for its horseshoes. In the days of Cromwell we
find Horsham to have been principally Royalist; one engagement with
Parliamentarians is recorded in which it lost three warriors to
Cromwell's one. In the reign of William III. a young man claiming to be
the Duke of Monmouth, and travelling with a little court who addressed
him as "Your Grace," turned the heads of the women in many an English
town--his good looks convincing them at once, as the chronicler says,
that he was the true prince. Justices sitting at Horsham, however,
having less susceptibility to the testimony of handsome features, found
him to be the son of an innkeeper named Savage, and imprisoned him as a
vagrant and swindler.

[Sidenote: PRESSING TO DEATH]

Horsham was the last place in which pressing to death was practised. The
year was 1735, and the victim a man unknown, who on being charged with
murder and robbery refused to speak. Witnesses having be