“The next tenement is a place of importance—the Rose Inn [‘The Swan’], a whitewashed building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging sign, with a little bow-window room coming out on one side and forming with our stable on the other a sort of open square, which is the constant resort of carts, waggons and return chaises. There are two carts there now, and mine host is serving them with beer in his eternal red waistcoat.... He has a stirring wife, a hopeful son and a daughter, the belle of the village, not so pretty as the fair nymph of the shoe shop, and less elegant, but ten times as fine, all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flowers than curl-papers and more lovers than curls.... “In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden wall belonging to a house under repair; the white house opposite the collar-maker’s shop, with four lime trees before it and a waggon load of bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for bricks and mortar.... Our good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms and made them dark, so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing midsummer sun.” [Illustration: THE SWAN INN] Here we would remark that when paying our first visit to Three Mile Cross many years ago that house was unchanged, and the row of old pollarded limes still stood as sentinels before it; but since then the house has been altered and the trees have disappeared. We would also mention that the real name of the inn is the “Swan,” but in all her village tales Miss Mitford calls it the “Rose.” The “collar-maker’s shop,” on the opposite side of the road, a quaint little edifice, is just as it was in appearance in the writer’s day.