Close by is Riddens Farm, a picturesque little homestead, with tile-hung front and clustered chimneys. It still contains one of those old Sussex cast-iron firebacks mentioned in an earlier page, dated 1622. Below Ansty, two miles or thereby down the road, the little river Adur is passed at Bridge Farm, and the twin towns of St. John's Common and Burgess Hill are reached. Before 1820 their sites were fields and common land, wild and gorse-covered, free and open. Few houses were then in sight; the "Anchor" inn, by Burgess Hill, the reputed haunt of smugglers, who stored their contraband in the woods and heaths close by; and the "King's Head," at St. John's Common, with two or three cottages--these were all. [Illustration: OLD SUSSEX FIREBACK, RIDDENS FARM.] [Sidenote: BURGESS HILL] St. John's Common, partly in Keymer and partly in Clayton parishes, was enclosed piecemeal, between 1828 and 1855, by an arrangement between the lords of the manors and the copyholders, who divided the plunder between them, when this large tract of land resently became the site of these towns of St. John's Common and Burgess Hill, which sprang up, if not with quite the rapidity of a Californian mining-town, at least with a celerity previously unknown in England. Their rapid rise was of course due to the Brighton Railway and its station. There are, however, nowadays not wanting signs, quite apart from the condition of the brick and tile and drainpipe-making industry, on which the two mushroom towns have come into being, that the unlovely places are in a bad way. Shops closed and vainly offered "to let" tell a story of artificial expansion and consequent depression: the inevitable Nemesis of discounting the future. [Illustration: JACOB'S POST.] I will show you what the site of these uninviting modern places was like, a hundred years ago. It is not far, geographically, from the sorry streets of Burgess Hill to the wild, wide commons of Wivelsfield and Ditchling; but such a change is wrought in two miles and a half as would be considered impossible by any who have not made the excursion into those beautiful regions. They show us, in survival, what the now hackneyed main roads were like three generations ago. [Sidenote: JACOB'S POST]