“I knew of no town to be compared to Ipswich,” wrote old Cobbett, “except it be Nottingham, and there is this difference that Nottingham stands high and on one side looks over a fine country whereas Ipswich is in a dell, meadows running up above it and a beautiful arm of the sea below it. From the town itself you can see nothing, but you can in no direction go from it a charter of a mile without finding views that a painter might crave, and then the country round is so well cultivated.” A good deal has been done for Ipswich since Cobbett’s day. It has its public promenades and in the neighbourhood of the river there still lingers somewhat of the scenery Gainsborough loved to paint. There is also a good deal of literary association connected with Ipswich. The White Horse Inn still remains in much the same state as it was in the times of Mr. Pickwick, “famous,” wrote Dickens, “in the neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county paper chronicled turnip or unwieldy pig for its enormous size.” Any one who has sojourned there will find it easy to understand how the illustrious Pickwick came to mistake a lady’s bed-chamber for his own. Why should not the Great White Horse be as dear to the admirers of Dickens as the Leather Bottle at Cobham? If the admirers of Pickwick rush as they do by hundreds to Cobham to view the room where Pickwick slept, why, it may be asked, should not a similar patronage be extended to the Great White Horse at Ipswich. Curious people besides Pickwick and his friends have favoured Ipswich. There lived there in the reign of William III., a family known as the “odd family,” a most appropriate name, as the following facts clearly prove. Every event, good, bad, or indifferent, came to that family in an odd year, or on an odd day of the month, and every member of it was odd in person, manner, or behaviour. Even the letters of their christian names always amounted to an odd number. The father and mother were Peter and Rahab; their seven children (all boys) bore the names of Solomon, Roger, James, Matthew, Jonas, David, and Ezekiel. The husband possessed only one leg, and his wife only one arm; Solomon was blind in his left eye, and Roger lost his right optic by an accident. James had his left ear pulled off in a quarrel; Matthew’s left hand had but three fingers; Jonas had a stump foot; David was humpbacked; and Ezekiel was 6ft. 2in at the age of 19. Every one of the children had red hair, notwithstanding the fact that the father’s hair was jet black and the mother’s white. Strange at birth all died as strange. The father fell into a deep sawpit and was killed; the wife died five years after of starvation. Ezekiel enlisted, was afterwards wounded in 23 places, but recovered. Roger, James, Matthew, Jonas, and David died in 1713, in different places on the same day; Solomon and Ezekiel were drowned in the Thames in 1723.