Soon we reached the pleasant little town of Wickham, where William of Wykeham was born in 1324, and that is its only claim to fame as far as I know. It is a tiny town with a wide market-place, and it looked very sleepy that day. It consists of a number of gabled houses, mostly old and of various dates, the oldest, as usual, being the most picturesque. The modern city architect, with some very rare exceptions, appears to be ashamed of gables and of chimneys that so pleasantly break and vary the skyline. Wickham just escapes being quaint, but it retains the slumberous calm of old times. The charm that these quiet little unprogressive old towns have for some people lies not alone in their antiquity, though this has much to do with it, nor in their picturesqueness, for they are not all picturesque, except for an odd building here and there, but in their rare restfulness and completeness, for they never seem to grow or get ugly: now prosperous towns are always growing and eating up the green fields around, they have an unfinished look that displeases, and their modern buildings are hopelessly uninteresting, when not positively unsightly, and there is no sense of repose about them. They go in for plate-glass and show, and for tramways when they can. At Wickham we discovered a water-mill, built about a century ago, though it looked much older; the big beams within it were made out of the timbers of the U.S. frigate _Chesapeake_ that was captured by H.M.S. frigate _Shannon_ in that famous sea-fight of 1813, and some of the timbers bear the marks of the cannon-balls still. So in the most unlikely places we came upon history--indeed we never passed a day that we did not at some spot or another.