LEWES AND ITS COUNTRY 81 



old houses which every year it must (apparently) 

 almost touch. This means experience and care. 

 My word ! you should have heard the magisterial 

 Mr Verrall, at the White Hart, expounding the 

 unwritten law of the societies to a company of 

 young gentlemen who suffered somewhat through 

 inadvertently, maybe, interfering with arrange- 

 ments. They came for the bread of sympathy — 

 not that bread is so efficacious in cases of black 

 eye as beef — and were given the stone — a rather 

 good thing a stone, laid on cold in the early 

 stages of a mouse's development — of admonition. 

 Theirs was the only instance I came across where 

 a ''collision" happened, and this didn't matter 

 much one way or the other. The sportsman 

 with the variegated peeper — a pretty sight he 

 would have been next morning if the kind lady 

 who prescribed arnica for him had applied that 

 remedy ; I tried that tincture once, and came out 

 as chromatic as a bit of oxidised copper ore — he 

 didn't mind, nor the brother visitor, who had a 

 bare patch where the skin had been knocked off 

 the bridge of his nose. They sensibly consoled 

 themselves in that, like the celebrated Roman 

 Matron, they too had not been idle, and — but I 

 must cut Fifth of Novembering and get on. 



Stay, I must just re-tell a true yarn about the 

 first original Guy Fawkes day. I say true, 

 because two old friends used most solemnly 

 swear to the truth of this ghost story. One poor 

 chap, a good sportsman, is dead and gone — Mr 

 Fred Howcroft, who ran one or two comic opera 

 companies. The other friend would, I know, 

 corroborate me. Here is the story cut short. 

 My informants used to live near Tilbury, in an 

 old manor house, rendezvous for some of the Guy 



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