In the coffee-room of mine inn I discovered a Visitors' Book, and I glanced through it in the faint hope of perhaps finding there some quaint or humorous effusion, but the day seems past for these things. Of old such men as Kingsley, Tom Taylor, Tom Hughes, and a host of other literary wits were not above making merry in these books; even such notables as Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Pepys, to mention a few of the many, amused themselves by recording their names, scratched with diamonds, on the window-panes of some of the old inns and houses they visited, and in a few instances their signatures remain there to this day. I saw that of Sir Walter Scott in Shakespeare's birthplace not long ago. Seldom now either do I come across any quaint or notable epitaph in our churchyards, yet when I was young I came upon many a one. Indeed I had a notebook filled with them, and curious they were. As I have previously remarked, Time is not the only culprit responsible for their disappearance, though Time has had his hand in the matter, and there is now no Old Mortality to re-cut crumbling inscriptions. A case was brought to my notice where a quaint epitaph (quite harmlessly quaint, as a layman, I thought) was deliberately chiselled off a tombstone "by the parson's orders." In the Visitors' Book at "The Swan" I came upon the following:-- In July a man came to the Swan And the fat of the land lived upon, "But," said he, in September If I rightly remember, "It's just about time I moved on."