Beyond this, one comes in a mile to the casual, disjointed, and scattered collection of houses called Farnborough, once a spruce and busy “thoroughfare” hamlet in the days of coaching: now a rather seedy place of resident market-gardeners and tramping hop-pickers. The old “George and Dragon” inn, that in the Queen Annean sort faces you on approach and, as it were, plants its considerable bulk half-way into the road, as though to dare your passing, has been furbished up in the public-house kind, and without difficulty stops the passage of most. It has a portico with pillars painted and grained to resemble real marble; but the veins are too preposterous, and the much more real compo underneath peeps out, like the obvious advertisement in a badly written puff. If I were an amateur of ugly houses—which the Lord forbid—I would turn to the right-hand here and make for Downe, which is two miles distant. For there, by the pond of that pretty village, stands the hideous mansion in which Darwin lived, and where, in 1882, he died of a chill caught in prowling at night on the lawn with a dark lantern, studying earthworms. A carpenter near by preserves the coffin, with inscription all complete, in which the great naturalist was to have been laid (but for some reason was not), and strangely morbid people, with gruesome ideas of sight-seeing, go numerously to see it. Keeping, however, to the main road and on to Green Street Green, we cannot altogether avoid the ugly, which appears, very large and brutal, in the Oak Brewery. I am told it is a famous brewing firm, but one willingly forgets their name, and only knows that their buildings are ugly and sooty, and look dry and make one feel thirsty. Perhaps there is more in that than meets the eye. Green Street Green really _has_ a green: a thing which in a world where New College, Oxford, and the numerous Newports throughout the country are among the oldest of institutions and places, and where villages with the prefix “Great” are almost inevitably among the smallest, was by no means to be counted upon as a certainty. And not only has Green Street Green a green, but it is rather a large and a not unbeautiful specimen. But perhaps its most striking feature is the extraordinary number of old City of London cast-iron posts, indicating the boundaries of the old Coal and Wine Dues area. It seems as though the City, having delimited those bounds in a fifteen-miles radius from London, and come at last, full circle, to Green Street Green, found itself with a surplus stock of posts, and so set them up here, rather than be at the trouble of taking them home again. It was somewhere near here that, about 1783, a malefactor who had robbed the mail was hanged in chains, upon the scene of his crime. A house was formerly pointed out, with a window bricked up at that time in order to shut out the view of the blackened body of the robber swinging and circling on his gibbet.