The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the "White Lion," and a few attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the wayfarers' attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. A mean little house called "Casa querca"--by which I suppose the author means Oak House--is "refinement," as imagined in the suburbs, and excites the passing sneer, "Is not the English language good enough?" If the Italians will only oblige, and call their own "Bella Vistas" "Pretty View," and so forth, while we continue the reverse process here, we shall effect a fair exchange, and find at last an Old England over-sea. [Illustration: CRAWLEY: LOOKING SOUTH.] At the beginning of Crawley stands the "Sun" inn, and away at the other end is the "Half Moon"; trivial facts not lost upon the guards and coachmen of the coaching age, who generally propounded the stock conundrum when passing through, "Why is Crawley the longest place in existence?" Every one unfamiliar with the road "gave it up"; when came the answer, "Because the sun is at one end and the moon at the other." It is evident that very small things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers. We have it, on the authority of writers who fared this way in early coaching days, that Crawley was a "poor place," by which we may suppose that they meant it was a village. But what did they expect--a city? Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world features, but it has grown, and is still growing. Its most striking peculiarity is the extraordinary width of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a town, and yet can scarce term a village; and the next most remarkable thing is the bygone impudence of some forgotten land-snatchers who seized plots in midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, and built houses on them. By what slow, insensible degrees these sites, doubtless originally those of market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us; but we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed wooden ones, and those in course of time giving place to more substantial structures, and so forth, in the time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed like islands in the middle of the street, sealed and sanctified the long-drawn tale of grab.