Cuckfield is evidently feeling, more and more, the altered condition of affairs. Motorists, who are supposed to bring back prosperity to the road, do nothing of the kind on the road to Brighton; for those who live at Brighton or London merely want to reach the other end as quickly as possible, and, with a legal limit up to twenty miles an hour, can cover the distance in two hours and a half, and, with an occasional illegal interval, easily in two hours. Except in case of a breakdown, the wayside hostelries do not often see the colour of the motorists' money, but they smell the stink, and are choked with the dust of them, and landlords and every one else concerned would be only too glad if the project for building a road between London and Brighton, exclusively for motor traffic, were likely to be realised. Then ordinary users of the highway might once more be able to discern the natural scenery of the road, at present obscured with dust-clouds. The text for these remarks is furnished by the recent closing, after a hundred and fifty years or more, of the once chief inn of Cuckfield: the fine and stately "Talbot," now empty and "To Let"; the hospitable quotation "You're welcome, what's your will," from _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ on its fanlight, reading like a bitter mockery. The interior of Cuckfield Church is crowded with monuments of the Sergisons and the Burrells. Pride of place is given in the chancel to the monument of Charles Sergison, who died in 1732, aged 78. It is a very fine white marble monument, with a figure of Truth gazing into her mirror, and holding with one hand a medallion partly supported by a Cupid, displaying a portrait of the lamented Sergison, who, we learn from a sub-acid inscription, was "Commissioner of the Navy forty-eight years, till 1719, to the entire satisfaction of the King and his Ministers." "The civil government of the Navy then being put into military hands, he was esteemed by them not a fit person to serve any longer." He was, in short, like those "rulers of the Queen's (or King's) Navee" satirised by Sir W. S. Gilbert in modern times, and "never went to sea." At the period of his compulsory retirement it seems to have rather belatedly occurred to the authorities that such an one could not be well acquainted with the needs of the Navy; so the "Capacity, Penetration, exact Judgment" of this "true patriot" were shelved; but, at any rate, he had had his whack, and it was surely high time for the exact judgment, true patriotism, capacity and penetration of others to have a chance of making something out of the nation. [Illustration: THE ROAD OUT OF CUCKFIELD.]