A short mile before reaching Woolhampton, there stands, on the left-hand side of the road, quite lonely, a wayside inn, the "Rising Sun," a relic of coaching times. They still show one, in the parlour, the old booking-office in which parcels were received for the old road-waggons that plied with luggage between London and Bath, and talk of the days when the house used to own stabling for forty horses. A larger inn is the "Angel," at Woolhampton, with a most elaborate iron sign, from which depends a little carved figure of a vine-crowned Bacchus, astride his barrel, carved forty years ago by a wood-carver engaged on the restoration of Woolhampton Church. Tramps and other travellers unacquainted with the classics generally take this vinous heathen god to be a representation of the Angel after whom the inn was named. [Illustration: WOOLHAMPTON.] Woolhampton, once blessed with two "Angels," has now but one, for what was once known as the "Upper Angel" has been re-named the "Falmouth Arms." Although Woolhampton village possesses a railway station on the Hants and Berks branch of the Great Western Railway, travellers will look in vain for the name of it in their railway guides. If they will refer to "Midgham," however, they will have found it under another title. Originally called by the name of the village, it was found that passengers and luggage frequently lost their way here in mistake for Wolverhampton, also on the Great Western, and so the name had to be changed. [Illustration: THATCHAM.] [Sidenote: _THATCHAM_] Three and a half miles from Woolhampton comes Thatcham, famed in the coaching age for its "King's Head" inn, but now a decayed market town which has sunk to the status of a very dull village. A battered stone, all that remains of a market cross, stands in the middle of the wide, deserted street, enclosed by a circular seat, bearing an inscription recounting the history of the market, and the kingly protection which Henry the Third afforded the place against the "Newbury men." But, kingly help notwithstanding, the "Newbury men" have long since snatched its trade away from Thatcham, which has become a village, while Newbury has grown to be a town of 20,000 inhabitants. The only interesting object in the long street is Thatcham Chapel, an isolated Perpendicular building, purchased for 10_s._ by Lady Frances Winchcombe in 1707. She presented it to a Blue Coat school which she founded in the village. XXV Newbury, the "hated rival," is three miles down the road. Within a mile of it in coaching times, but now not to be distinguished from the town itself, is Speenhamland, the site of that famous coaching inn, the "Pelican," whose charges were of so monumental a character that Quin has immortalized them in the lines:-- "The famous inn at Speenhamland, That stands beneath the hill, May well be called the Pelican, From its enormous bill."