At Wormley, a roadside village of nondescript character, the New River is crossed, bringing us into Broxbourne, lying in a dip of the road, with that famous Cockney resort, Broxbourne Gardens, off to the right, by the river Lea. The Gardens themselves are as popular as ever, but the medicinal spring--the "rotten-egg water" is the eloquently descriptive name of it--has fallen into neglect. The traveller along the highroad has left Broxbourne behind before he has quite discovered he has reached it, and comes into Hoddesdon unawares. Broxbourne, where the "brocks," or badgers, were once plentiful enough to give a name to the little stream running into the Lea, is indeed a much more shy and retiring place than those who on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays visit the tea-gardens aforesaid have any idea of. This is by way of a testimonial. Hoddesdon, too, which to be sure is not a tiny village like Broxbourne, but quite a little town, is altogether delightful. It has not been modernised, and its inhabitants still obtain their water in pailsful from the public pump in the middle of the broad street, which remains much as it was when the Cambridge "Telegraph" came through, and when the Newmarket and Bishop Stortford traffic branched off to the right in the midst. To this day most of its old inns remain, clustering round the fork of the roads: the Bull, its gabled porch and projecting sign quickening the traveller's pace as he sees it afar; the Salisbury Arms, the Maiden's Head, the Swan. The Bull is a famous house, finding, as it does, a mention in Prior's "Down Hall." It was in 1715 that Matthew Prior, one of the most notable poets of his day, and sometime Ambassador at the Court of Versailles, travelled this road to Down Hall, near Hatfield Broadoak. His "chariot" halted at the Bull, as he tells us-- "Into an old inn did this equipage roll, At a town they call Hodsdon, the sign of the Bull, Near a nymph with an urn that divides the highway, And into a puddle throws mother of tea." Nymph and urn and puddle are gone long since, and where they were placed there stands at this day the ugly modern building that Hoddesdon folk call the "Clock House": really a fire-engine house with a clock-tower; the tower surmounted by a weather-vane oddly conjoining the characteristics of a fiddler, a sagittarius, and a dolphin. Inquiry fails to discover what it symbolises. Before ever the nymph or the present building occupied this site, there stood here the wayside chapel of St. Catherine, whose ancient bell hangs in the clock-tower. [Illustration: HODDESDON.] Prior writes as though the Bull had long been familiar to him, but his intimate touches of the life and character of an inn came, doubtless, from his own youthful observation; for his uncle had been landlord of the Rummer at Charing Cross, where as a boy he had been a waiter and general help. Doubtless he had heard many an old frequenter of the Rummer put questions similar to these he asks:--