Retracing our steps to the Holyhead Road again, the “dumpling hills of Northamptonshire,” as Horace Walpole calls them, give place to the long Warwickshire levels. Four miles and a half from Daventry, and just before reaching Willoughby village, lying off the road, the Great Central Railway comes from Rugby, and crosses over on an embankment and a blue-brick-and-iron-girder bridge; a station labelled “Willoughby, for Daventry,” looking up and down the road. Does any one, it may be asked, ever alight for Daventry in this solitary road, four miles and a half distant from that town, on the inducement of that notice? And when the innocent traveller has thus alighted, what does he say when he gets his bearings, and finds himself thus marooned, far away from where he would be? Possibly he resorts, after being thus scurvily tricked by the railway company, to the “Four Crosses” Inn, a house with a history, standing close by. The old inn of that name, demolished in 1898, faced the bye-road to Willoughby village; the new building fronts the highway. The junction of roads at this point has only three arms, hence the original sign of the “Three Crosses,” changed to four, according to the received story, at the suggestion of Dean Swift, who was a frequent traveller along this road between Dublin and London, riding horseback, with one attendant. The old inn, hardly more than a wayside pot-house, was scarce a fit stopping place for that dignitary; but it is well known that Swift delighted in such places and the odd society to be met in them, and it may have been in some ways more convenient than the usual posting-houses at Daventry and Dunchurch. [Illustration: THE “FOUR CROSSES,” WILLOUGHBY (DEMOLISHED 1898).] The story runs that on one of his journeys, anxious for breakfast and to be off, he could not hurry the landlady, who tartly told him “he must wait, like other people.” He waited, of necessity, but employed the time in writing with his diamond ring upon one of the panes:— There are three Crosses at your door: Hang up your Wife And you’l count Four. Swift, D., 1730.[2] The landlord probably did not hang up his wife, but he certainly seems to have altered his sign. Footnote 2: The date is worth notice. All who have ever written on Swift give his last visit to England as 1727. But this flatly contradicts them. Nor is it in order to suppose this inscription a forgery, for it exhibits the characteristic handwriting of the Dean, as seen in his manuscript diary at South Kensington.