Bawtry to-day is a great emptiness. Four-square red-brick houses of a certain modishness, being indeed built on the model of town houses, look across the void roadway, with a kind of patronising air, upon the peaked, timbered, or lath-and-plaster gabled cottages that border the opposite side of the street. Much older they are, those old cottages, and more akin to the country. They were built long centuries before the coaching age came, bringing a greater prosperity and consequent expansion to Bawtry, and for a time they were quite put out of countenance by the new-fangled brick houses, with their classic porticoes and brass knockers and impudent red faces. But a period of eighty or ninety years, at the most, saw the beginning and the end of this expansion, and this once fashionable air has altered to an aspect of old-world dignity. Both the gabled cottages and these Georgian houses would feel greatly degraded if confronted with examples of the way in which the small country builder runs up his tasteless structures nowadays, but happily Bawtry has nothing of this type to show, and the white stuccoed elevation of the “Crown” alone hints at a later phase in building fashion, typifying the dawn of the nineteenth century and the course of taste in its earlier years. This white-painted frontage marks the close of Bawtry’s busy days. Soon afterwards the place ceased to live a pulsing everyday life of business and activity, and began to merely exist. There are shops here—old bow-windowed, many-paned shops—which have long seen their best days go by. They came into existence under the influence of the beatific Law of Demand and Supply, when all the inns were full of travellers who wanted the thousand and one necessities of civilisation. They did a brave trade in those times, and continued it until the railway snuffed it out in 1842. Since then no one has come to buy, and their stock must contain many curiosities. Probably the stationer has still some of that goffered and perfumed pink notepaper on which the young ladies of sensibility wrote their love-letters in the long-ago, together with a goodly supply of the wafers with which they were sealed; and, doubtless, those who seek could find flint and steel and tinder-boxes elsewhere. Bawtry, in fine, is a monument to the Has Been. [Picture: The “Crown,” Bawtry] Austerfield, where William Bradford was born in 1580, is a grim and unlovely village to the left of Bawtry. Here yet stands his birthplace, in its time a manor-house, but now occupied as two cottage-dwellings, it is not a romantic-looking relic to be the place of origin of one who became the first Governor of the Pilgrim colony in New England.