It is a sporting—more especially a horsey—county. “Shake a bridle over a Yorkshireman’s grave, and he will rise and steal a horse,” is a proverb which bears a sort of testimony to the fact. XXXIII YORKSHIRE and Yorkshiremen, their virtues and vices, bring us to Bawtry, where the High Sheriff and those in authority used to welcome kingly and queenly visitors to Yorkshire, or escort them over the border, on leaving; performing the latter office with the better heart, there can be little doubt, for royal progresses often left a trail of blood and ruin behind them in those “good” old times. Happy Bawtry! for little or no history attaches to the little town, and it lives in the memory only as the home of that saddler who, although famous as a proverb, has come down to us a nameless martyr to the Temperance Cause. “The saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving his ale,” runs the Yorkshire saying; one eminently characteristic of this county of stingo and plurality of acres. The history of this particular saddler, or the crime for which he was condemned, are unknown either here or at York, but his end is a terrible warning to all Blue Ribbonites. It was in this wise that the artificer in pigskin lost his life. Led forth to the fatal tree, the procession halted on the way to present the condemned with the customary parting bowl of ale, an institution on the way to the gallows both in York and London. But the saddler would take none of their farewell courtesies, and refused the drink; whereupon the enraged mob strung him up, double quick. A few minutes later a reprieve arrived, and they cut him down; but he was already dead, a melancholy warning to all future generations of non-convivial souls. Coaching days made Bawtry a busy townlet, for although the coaches and the postmasters generally made a long stage of fourteen miles between Doncaster and Barnby Moor, or else a nine and a half mile stage between Doncaster and Scrooby Top, the by-roads gave a good proportion of business to the “Angel” and the “Crown.” The “Crown” is still a prominent feature of Bawtry’s now empty street, a street whose width is a revelation of the space once considered necessary and now altogether superfluous; just as the long pillared range of stableyards beyond the old coach archway of the inn itself has now become.