The old coach passengers, driving through, or changing at, Great Smeaton must have often wondered, seeing the smallness of the place, what size the neighbouring Little Smeaton, away off to the left, could have been. Their inquiries on that head were usually answered by the coachmen, who were wags of sorts, that Little Smeaton consisted of one dog-kennel and two hen-coops. It is a lonely road between Northallerton and Darlington, and quips of this kind probably tasted better when administered on the spot than they do to the armchair traveller. Particularly lonely is High Entercommon, where a turnpike-gate stood in the days that are done, together with an inn, the “Golden Lion,” where a few coaches which made a longer stage from Northallerton changed. Were it not that William Thompson, landlord at the best period in the history of coaching, was a highly reputable person, and had been coachman to Sir Bellingham Graham before he set up as innkeeper, we might point to the house and say how suitable a locality for the secret roadside crimes of old, of which novelists delight to tell! Roads, and travelling before railways, used to set the romancists busily engaged in spinning the most blood-curdling stories of villainous innkeepers who, like Bob Acres, kept “churchyards of their own,” and murderous trap-doors in their guest-rooms giving upon Golgothas filled with the bones of their many victims. If one might credit these astounding stories, the inns that were not murder-shops were few and far between; but happily those writers, anxious only to make your blood creep, were as a rule only exercising their particularly gory imaginations.