"'Come here, my sweet landlady! how do you do? Where's Cic'ly so cleanly, and Prudence, and Sue? And where is the widow that lived here below? And the other that sang, about eight years ago? And where is your sister, so mild and so dear, Whose voice to her maids like a trumpet was clear?' 'By my troth,' she replies, 'you grow younger, I think. And pray, sir, what wine does the gentleman drink? But now, let me die, sir, or live upon trust, If I know to which question to answer you first, For things since I saw you most strangely have varied-- The ostler is hanged, and the widow is married; And Prue left a child for the parish to nurse; And Cic'ly went off with a gentleman's purse; And as to my sister, so mild and so dear, She has lain in the churchyard full many a year.'" What a sorry catalogue of changes and disasters! A mile or more distant, along the Bishop Stortford road, is the gatehouse of the famous Rye House, its clustered red-brick chimneys and thick walls still left to remind the historically-minded of that Rye House Plot of 1681 which was to have ended Charles the Second, and his brother, the Duke of York, on their way past from Newmarket to London. Although the Bishop Stortford road does not concern us, the house is alluded to in these pages because it now contains that notorious piece of furniture, the Great Bed of Ware. Hoddesdon gives place to Amwell, steeply downhill. The village is properly "Great Amwell," but no one who knows his Lamb would think of calling it so, although there is a "Little Amwell" close at hand. To the Lambs it was just "Amwell," and that is sufficient for us. Moreover, like so many places named "Great," it is now really very small. It is, however, exceedingly beautiful, with that peculiarly park-like beauty characteristic of Hertfordshire. The old church, also of the characteristically Hertfordshire type, stands, charmingly embowered amid trees, on a bank overlooking the smoothly-gliding stream of the New River, new-born from its source in the Chadwell Spring, and hurrying along on its beneficent mission toward the smoke and fog of London. Two islands divide the stream; one of them containing a monument to Sir Hugh Myddelton, and a stone with lines from Scott, the "Quaker poet of Amwell," commencing-- "Amwell, perpetual be thy stream, Nor e'er thy spring be less." An aspiration which, let us hope, will be fulfilled. XIV