184 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



At the beginning of Crawley stands the " Sun " inn, 

 and away at the other end is the " Half Moon " : 

 trivial facts not lost upon the guards and coachmen 

 of the coaching age, who generally propounded the 

 stock conundrum when passing through, " Why is 

 Crawley the longest place in existence ? ' Every one 

 unfamiliar with the road " gave it up " ; when came 

 the answer, " Because the sun is at one end and the 

 moon at the other." It is evident that very small 

 things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers. 



We have it, on the authority of writers who fared 

 this way in early coaching days, that Crawley was a 

 " poor place," by which we may suppose that they 

 meant it was a village. But what did they expect— 

 a city ? 



Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world 

 features, but it has grown, and is still growing. Its 

 most striking peculiarity is the extraordinary width 

 of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a 

 town, and yet can scarce term a village ; and the next 

 most remarkable thing is the bygone impudence of 

 some forgotten land-snatchers who seized plots in 

 midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, 

 and built houses on them. Bv what slow, insensible 

 degrees these sites, doubtless originally those of 

 market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us ; but 

 we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed 

 wooden ones, and those in course of time giving place 

 to more substantial structures, and so forth, in the 

 time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed 

 like islands in the middle of the street, sealed and 

 sanctified the long-drawn tale of grab. 



Even Crawley's generous width of roadwav cannot 

 have been an inch too wide for the traffic that crowded 

 the village when it was a stage at which every coach 

 stopped, when the air resounded with the guards' 

 winding of their horns, or the playing of the occasional 

 key-bugle to the airs of " Sally in our Alley " or 

 Love's Young Dream." Then the " George " was the 

 scene of a continual bustling, with the shouting of 



