Doncaster, out of the season, is a singularly quiet and inoffensive town, and looks as innocent as its native butterscotch. Quiet, because the locomotive and carriage-works of the Great Northern Railway are a little way outside; inoffensive, because it is unpretending. At the same time it is just as singularly devoid of interest. Almost its oldest houses are those on Hall Cross Hill, as the traveller passes the elm-avenue by the racecourse and enters the town from the direction of London; and they are scarce older than the days of the Prince Regent. Very like the older part of Brighton, this southern end of Doncaster is the best the town has to show. Hall Cross—originally called “Hob Cross”—was destroyed in the seventeenth-century troubles. It was a late Norman structure, and is copied in the existing Cross, set up by the Corporation, as an inscription informs the passer-by, in 1793. A weird structure it is, too, consisting of a stone pillar of five engaged shafts, reflecting credit on neither the original designer nor the restorers. But there it stands, elevated above the modern road, as evidence of a momentary aberration in favour of restoring antiquity of which the Corporation were guilty, a century or so ago. Doncastrians have purged themselves so thoroughly of that weakness in later years that they have left no other vestige of old times in their streets. The finest example of an old inn belonging to the town was destroyed in the pulling down of the “Old Angel” in 1846, in order to clear a site for the Guildhall. Others are left, but, if old-fashioned, they are scarcely picturesque: the “Angel,” “Ram,” “Elephant,” “Salutation,” and “Old George.” [Picture: Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse] In old newspaper files we find Richard Wood, of the “Reindeer” and “Ram” inns, High Street, advertising that his coaches were the best—“the horses keep good time—_no_ racing”; from which we conclude that there _had_ been some. It was Richard Wood, then the foremost coach-proprietor in Doncaster, who first gave employment to that celebrated painter of horses and coaches, John Frederick Herring, who, although a Londoner born, lived long and worked much at Doncaster. It was in 1814, when in his nineteenth year, that he first came to the town, the love of horses bringing him all the way. Seeing the “Royal Union” starting at eight o’clock in the morning with “Doncaster” displayed in large letters on its panels, on the inspiration of the moment he took a seat, and arrived in time to witness the horse “William” win the St. Leger.