On my return home I hunted in every likely book for any information upon the Devil's doorway, but found no allusion to the subject. I sought out several parsons, presuming that one of them would surely be able to throw some light on the matter; but they all declared that they had never heard of such a thing, so I began to think that the stranger had made a fool of me, and that I was myself a fool to be so easily taken in. Yet when I recalled the stranger's face, it had an honest look; he seemed hardly a man to invent so poor a joke, and, provided it was a joke, I failed to see the humour of it. Then one day afterwards, when chatting with a learned antiquary, I suddenly remembered about the Devil's door; so I mentioned the tale about it I had been told, and he confirmed the truth of it. "Such doors in churches were quite common, if not universal, long ago," he said; "they were always on the north or Devil's side of the church, and may still be found in many churches, though their purport has long been forgotten. I even remember a certain parson who, only twenty odd years past, insisted on having this door kept wide open during a christening, so as to afford a ready escape for the Devil, who was supposed to be driven out of the child." Curiously enough, after making so many vain inquiries on the subject, I found friends to whom the former existence and use of the Devil's door was quite well known. Leaving the church I went down the village street to inspect the ancient priest-house. This proved to be a long, low, half-timber building; its roof was of stone slates, as most roofs of the period were; the house has manifestly been restored at some recent time, though carefully restored backwards, as far as I could judge, to the intention of the original builder. Unfortunately my photograph, here reproduced, gives no hint of the bloom of age that is upon it, or of the subtle curves of the weather-bleached timber caused by the stress of time. I have found in photographing many an ancient building, unless its walls are actually broken and decayed away, how little the photograph realises its antiquity. In my photograph of Boarstall Tower (that we shall come to later on), in spite of the years the tower has stood, and in spite of the battering of two sieges it has undergone, the ancient structure, hoary with the antiquity of over five centuries, looks almost as though the builder had but lately completed his work.