The first prominent object on approaching the town is the “Wheatsheaf” itself, boasting of being established in 1610, but rebuilt in the coaching age, and just a white-painted, stucco-fronted building with a courtyard and a general Pickwickian and respectable Early Victorian air. Opposite stands an “Independent Chapel, erected 1722,” which, with its secular air and big gates, looks like a converted inn. Continuing along the narrow and unpicturesque Sheaf Street thus entered, the unwary pilgrim, unobservant on wheels, is downhill at the other end and out of the town in the proverbial “jiffy,” or the not less proverbial “two-twos.” But Sheaf Street, lining the Holyhead Road, is a snare and a delusion. _That_ does not form the sum and substance of Daventry, sprawling largely down a street to the right and developing itself astonishingly at the end in a mutton-chop-shaped market-place, continued to the left hand again as a High Street. It is as though Daventry had long ago resolved to keep itself retired and select from the throng that once went up and down the Holyhead Road; and very quiet and empty the market-place looks to this day, with a church rebuilt in 1752 and supposed to be Doric: the exterior in a yellow sandstone rapidly crumbling away, and the interior like a concert-hall. The eye lights upon only one memorable thing, and that an epitaph to a certain Susanna Pritchett Godson, who died in 1809, aged twenty-five:— She was—— But room won’t let me tell you what. Name what a Wife should be, And She was that. [Illustration: DAVENTRY MARKET-PLACE.]