Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the old houses here and at Rochester, and, indeed, along a great portion of the Dover Road, is the great use of weather-boarding, chiefly on the upper storeys. An instance of this is seen at Strood at an inn, the "Crispin and Crispianus," standing in the main street. A still more interesting point about this old house is its pictorial swinging sign, overhanging the pathway--a representation of the two shoemaker brothers, Crispin and Crispian, at work, cobbling boots. The brothers were Christian martyrs who suffered death at Soissons, A.D. 287. How they came to serve as the sign of an inn is quite unknown. It has been suggested that, as Agincourt was fought on Saint Crispin's Day, this old sign is of the warlike and patriotic order to which belong the Waterloo, Wellington, Nelson, Alma, and Trafalgar signs that are so plentiful on this road; but it is a great deal more likely that it is a relic of the days when men made pilgrimages to Becket's shrine, when innkeepers found their account to lie in calling their houses after some popular saint or another. A curious incident in connection with the "Crispin and Crispianus" must be noted before we pass on. It happened in 1830. One night in September of that year, a doctor who had only just then commenced practice in Strood was called in to see a man lying at the point of death in an upper room of the old inn. He hastened to the place, and found a man lying in bed who told him that, although he was known only as an ostler, he was really the Earl of Coleraine, nephew of that notorious Colonel Hanger who is chiefly known as the riotous boon-companion of the Prince Regent in the early days of Brighton and the Pavilion. Colonel Hanger was the fourth earl, and succeeded his brother in the title, which he never assumed. He died, childless, in 1824, and the earldom became extinct. As Colonel Hanger was the youngest son of his father, and as no mention has ever been made of any of his elder brothers leaving sons, the matter is not a little mysterious, especially as the colonel's right to the title, had he chosen to use it, was not disputed. However, the strange man who died on September 20, 1830, at the "Crispin and Crispianus" apparently satisfied Doctor Humphrey Wickham of the truth of his story, and that his real name was Charles Parrott Hanger, instead of "Charley Roberts," by which he had been known at Strood and the neighbourhood for twenty years. During this time he had acted as ostler at the coaching inns of Rochester and Chatham; had tramped the country, selling laces, thread, tape, and other small wares; and on Sundays shaved labourers. He had deserted his wife years before. She was long dead, and he had a son apprenticed to a firm of ironmongers at Birmingham. To this son he left all he was possessed of, making the doctor his executor. It will not be imagined that this ex-ostler, dying in a room of the "Crispin and Crispianus," where he was