SUSSEX ROAD-LORE 101 



bourne, are going or gone. Letting them fall to 

 decay is paltry meanness, and stealing them is 

 low work, something in the canary-birds' sugar- 

 lifting or blind man's dog's pannikin-buzzing line, 

 quite at the bottom of the pettiest larceny. 



As a matter of fact, the Lewes Corporation 

 did walk off with one or two of the old mile-posts 

 to use for their own purposes. That, perhaps, 

 may be a reason why the eighth from Brighton 

 on their road is not a post at all but a stone slab 

 set up out of their reach in a first-floor wall nearly 

 opposite Keere-street, a slope whose steep way is 

 paved with the stony-heartedest of flint boulders. 

 They can't get at that, I am pleased to say, or 

 likely enough they would, for familiarity has bred 

 indifference to the lessons offered by two gaols 

 giving the town a tone. On the old London-to- 

 Brighton turnpike which runs through Lewes 

 and Uckfield, are (where they have been left) very 

 prettily adorned iron milestones with a device of 

 bells, wild lily-bells, somewhat similar to the old- 

 fashioned bell, which was a cup used for drinking, 

 as also for racing prizes. Witness the Paisley 

 silver bells. Going from one Brighton-through- 

 Lewes- to- London road to another — that running 

 by way of the Chaileys and Sheffield Park, and so 

 on by East Grinstead — you find the same 

 character of lily-bells adopted for the Chailey 

 Five Bells Inn. Now, what is the true inward- 

 ness and significance of the device ? When I 

 take my walks abroad on those highways I ask, 

 but no one has reasonable explanation to offer — 

 not even the hostelry landlord. 



Recurring to the subject of missing milestones 

 and the Lewes-to- Uckfield road, I feel pretty 

 certain as to what has become of some of these 



