t as the coaches, but they gained time when
the coach stopped to change horses, and so got the pick of the market. A
dog-drawn cart used to bring fish from Littlehampton to Godalming, where
oysters were often to be bought for three a penny." Three a penny, fresh
oysters! Fourpence a dozen all alive! The street cries must have been
most encouraging.

Other memories of old Godalming Miss Jekyll has preserved, one of them
her own, of a carrier-cart plying between Bramley and Guildford drawn by
dogs. Then there were the coaches that stopped at the King's Arms and
the Red Lion and other inns; Godalming, on the road to Portsmouth, saw
traffic which was merry and miserable. Sometimes a coach would swing
into the town carrying sixteen sailors, four inside and twelve out, paid
off from a man-of-war and going to London to spend their money. They
would walk back. Sometimes a midnight coach would bring unhappier
passengers; gangs of convicts in chains would be given something to eat
at the Red Lion; or the yard gates of the King's Arms would be closed,
and armed warders would let out their prisoners for a little rest on the
way to Botany Bay. But the sailors were the merry folk. They would
brandish their bottles and cheer, and sometimes, when the coach swayed,
would swing with it as sailors should on a sloping deck; then the coach
turned over.

Restorers in 1840, that unhappy age for beautiful old buildings, did
what they could to spoil Godalming's parish church. They packed it from
floor to roof with pews and galleries, knocked off a porch here, a
chantry there, doubled its accommodation and quartered its charm.
Thirty-nine years later Sir Gilbert Scott and Mr. Ralph Nevill did their
best to repair the injury and show the Norman pillars as they should be,
but some of the injury done was final. Still, the church within and
without is a noble building, and the leaden spire which soars up from
the tower is the finest in the county. The church has had at least three
famous vicars. One was Owen Manning, famous perhaps against his will,
for he asked that no monument for him should be added to the church. His
epitaph should be _Si monumentum requiris_, _perlege_, for he was the
originator and part author of the history of the county which was
finished, as we saw at Shere, by William Bray. Owen Manning's was a
great mind, but he had a great heart as well; for the work he did for
his book sent him blind at seventy-five, and he bore five m