The “Wheatsheaf” has long since been transformed into offices, and the “Crown,” that once owned a gallows-sign stretching across the road, has been given a modernised grey stucco front, and looks rather like a banking establishment. Among minor inns, the “Blackboy,” displaying the effigy of a little nigger, is of considerable age, and takes its name from the now extinct local Blackboy family who flourished greatly in Sevenoaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more modern inns include the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” whose device—_not_ granted by the College of Arms—is an ingenious arrangement of plumb-board and trowel. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BRICKLAYERS’ ARMS.”] But all Sevenoaks inns, past or present, yield in interest to the fine old mansion facing the high road near the church, and known as “The Old House.” All details of its history have been lost, and it is only known that it was once the “Three Cats”—probably “The Cats”—inn, celebrated by that late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century poet, Tom Durfey, who was kept by his patron, the sixth Earl of Dorset, at Knole as a mirth-maker and general bacchanalian laureate. You cannot imagine a poet with the Christian name of Tom being other than a bard of the barrel; and as for Tom Durfey, he was the most bacchic songster, and the dirtiest rhymester of all the dirty dogs of his age: which is why he is so reprobated by the good—and so read. In his song in praise of the “Incomparable Strong Beer of Knoll,” he says: There’s Adams, in hoping to pleasure his town, Declares the best French wine is sold at the “Crown,” And well it may be, for he takes good rates, And so does my jolly sleek friend at the “Cats.” But to strong beer my praises must come, Leave them to isinglass, egg-whites, and stum. Beer, fine as Burgundy, lifts high my soul When Joudrain perks up for the honour of Knoll. The “Cats” of course derived its sign from the arms of the lords of the manor, the Sackvilles of Knole, whose “supporters” are two leopards argent spotted sable, easily to be mistaken by the rustics of a land where leopards are not among the native fauna, for cats. It must have been an aristocrat among inns, for it remains still one of the noblest houses in Sevenoaks, with handsome red brick frontage of the time of William the Third or Queen Anne, with beautiful gardens in the rear, and others, equally beautiful, in front, on the opposite side of the road. It must have ceased to be an inn shortly after Tom Durfey wrote, for it has been in occupation as a private residence of the Austen family since about the middle of the eighteenth century. Opposite is the very beautiful, characteristically “Queen Anne”-style house, “The Chantry,” standing next the church and on the site of a demolished ecclesiastical building. It has lately been most exquisitely restored.