On lifting a hinged plate, the astonishing facts of this antique æronautical adventure may be found duly set out in an amusingly grandiloquent inscription, engraved on a bronze tablet let into the upper part of the stone-- "Let Posterity Know And Knowing be Astonished That On the 15 Day of September 1784 Vincent Lunardi of Lucca in Tuscany The first Aerial Traveller in Britain Mounting from the Artillery Ground in London And Traversing the Regions of the Air For Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes, In this Spot Revisited the Earth. On this Rude Monument For Ages be Recorded That Wondrous Enterprise Successfully atchieved By the Powers of Chemistry And the Fortitude of Man That Improvement in Science Which The Great Author of all Knowledge Patronising by His Providence The Invention of Mankind Hath graciously permitted To their Benefit And His own Eternal glory." * * * * * "This Plate A facsimile of the Original One was placed here in the month of November 1875 by Arthur Giles Puller of Youngsbury." Collier's End is a wayside hamlet of a few timber-framed and plaster cottages, leading to Puckeridge, where the ways to Cambridge divide: one going by Buntingford, Royston, and Melbourn; the other by Braughing, Barkway, Barley, and Fowlmere, meeting again at Harston in another nineteen miles. Away to the left, between Collier's End and Puckeridge, is St Edmund's College, a Roman Catholic seminary. Puckeridge itself, standing where the roads branch, grew in the old road-faring days from a tiny hamlet to be considerably larger than its mother-parish of Standon, a village nearly two miles distant, to the right-hand. That it developed early is quite evident in its two old inns, the fifteenth century Falcon, and the Old George, scarcely a hundred years younger. XVI WE will first take the right-hand road to Cambridge, by Barkway, for that would appear in early days to have been the favourite route. Braughing, the first village on this route, is soon reached, lying down below the highway beside the river Rib, with the usual roadside fringe of houses. The local pronunciation of the place-name is "Braffing." The road now begins to climb upwards to the crest of the Chilterns at Barley, passing the small hamlets of Quinbury and Hare Street, and through a bold country of rolling downs to Barkway, whose name, coming from Saxon words meaning "a way over the hill," is descriptive of its situation. Few signs of habitation are seen on the way, and those at great distances; Great and Little Hormead and Ansty peering down upon the road from distant hillsides.