House and Garden 
how he played truant with the village boys ; 
how he annoyed the schoolmaster and wor¬ 
ried his nurse until he was sent away on the 
coach to Rugby. Here is the very village 
where all this occurred. Thomas Hughes, 
the great lawyer and judge, lived hereabouts. 
He created 1 'om Brown, and lor that he is 
immortal. His legal triumphs will long 
have faded away when schoolboys of future 
generations will cling lovingly to the book 
which has described more truthfully than 
any other the life in English schools. 
What a quaint old village it is. The 
houses are of course the tiniest cottages. 
They are built of gray stone, with good 
thick walls, and their roofs are thatched. 
The trade of the thatcher is fast dying out. 
It was once a prosperous village craft, but 
today there are only at most three experts in 
the neighborhood. Thatching was one of 
the handicrafts which descended from father 
to son, so that when for any reason the suc¬ 
cession was broken a worker in the trade was 
lost to the next generation. 
But today brand new slates and tiles on 
the roofs of Uffiington cottages are a com¬ 
parative rarity. The windows are small, 
with leaded panes, and there are no two cot¬ 
tages in the entire village exactly alike. 
Those who built them did so, no doubt, just 
as the houses were wanted, using materials 
close at hand and taking no heed of any¬ 
thing save the purpose for which the dwell¬ 
ings were intended. Hence the picturesque 
grouping, and odd surprises to be found at 
every turn and corner. The little buildings 
seem to have dropped down by accident 
here and there by grassy lane or shallow 
brook. Each has its own little patch of 
ground, surrounded it may be with the 
stunted willows which are such a feature of 
this well-watered vale. 
You may cross the paddock when you get 
to the village church, and turn in to “ The 
Craven Arms,” the oldest inn of the neigh¬ 
borhood. 1 The palmy days of the “Swan,” 
as it was called in Tom Brown’s time, are 
over. No longer does the famous home¬ 
brewed ale draw the thirsty villagers for miles 
around to a hospitable fireside. The house 
is now “ tied ” to a brewer who sends what 
ale he will. Go inside, and you will find 
that much has been rearranged. Walls have 
been pulled down, paneling altered, doors 
curtailed or curiously lengthened. Heavy 
beams, however, still cross the ceilings and 
can be seen where their presence has not 
been hidden by lath and plaster, paper or 
whitewash. There is a magnificent cool cel¬ 
lar, the pride of the old landlord, who could 
keep his brew in condition in the hottest and 
most thundery weather. The general plan 
of the house is just as it always has been, and 
the exterior view shows it pretty much as it 
THE CHIMNEY CORNER AT THE WHITE 
HORSE INN 
looked to Tom Brown when he caught his 
first stickleback in the brook close by. The 
walls are extremely thick in some places, and 
the narrow stairs, twisting awkwardly up 
from the back of the bar, seem to have 
wedged themselves in at the last minute as 
1 In “The Scouring of the White Horse,” by Thomas Hughes, 
this inn is described as the Swan, and the old name is still used by 
many of the inhabitants of Uffington. 
93 
