And not only travellers on wheels; for since the fashion for walking came in, Crawley has had new excitements, or monotonies, in the shape of walking stockbrokers, walking butchers, walking auctioneers' clerks, walking Austrians pushing their families in wheelbarrows, walking bricklayers carrying hods of bricks, walking acrobats on stilts--all striving to get to Brighton within a certain time, and all accompanied by judges, referees, and friends. At Hand Cross, lower on the road, the numbers diminish; but every competitor seems to be able to reach Crawley, perhaps because the railway station adjoins the high road. It was not, for example, until he reached Crawley that the Austrian's wheelbarrow broke down. [Sidenote: LINDFIELD] On the other side of the line, two miles north-east of Hayward's Heath, is Lindfield, with its fine common of geese, its generous duck-pond, and wide straggling street of old houses and new (too many new, to my mind), rising easily to the graceful Early English church with its slender shingled spire. Just beyond the church is one of the most beautiful of timbered houses in Sussex, or indeed in England. When I first knew this house it was a farm in the hands of a careless farmer; it has been restored by its present owner with the most perfect understanding and taste. For too long no one attempted to do as much for East Mascalls, a timbered ruin lying low among the fields to the east of the village; but quite recently it has been taken in hand. [Illustration: _East Mascalls--before renovation._] A quaint Lindfield epitaph may be mentioned: that of Richard Turner, who died in 1768, aged twenty-one:-- Long was my pain, great was my grief, Surgeons I'd many but no relief. I trust through Christ to rise with the just: My leg and thigh was buried first. [Sidenote: "IDLEHURST"] I must not betray secrets, but it might be remarked that that kindly yet melancholy study of Wealden people and Wealden scenery, called _Idlehurst_--the best book, I think, that has come out of Sussex in recent years--may be read with some special appropriateness in this neighbourhood.