The window-pane disappeared from the old inn very soon afterwards, and it is not at all unlikely that the landlady herself saw to it being removed. Certainly it had disappeared in 1819, when some verses in the _Gentlemen’s Magazine_ gave the misquotation of those lines that has been the basis of every incorrect rendering since then. Many years ago the late Mr. Cropper, of Rugby, who was a native of Willoughby, and whose father had kept the “Four Crosses,” purchased the pane of a cottager in the village. It is of the old diamond shape, of green glass, and bears the words quoted above, scratched in a line, bold style. The distinction is wrongly claimed for the “Four Crosses” Inn at Hatherton, near Cannock, on the Watling Street; a very fine old coaching inn, under whose roof Swift must certainly often have stayed; but as the roads at that point form a complete cross of four arms, the sign must always have been what it is now, and certainly all the evidence points to the Willoughby claim being justified. Willoughby may on some old maps be found marked as a “spa,” and a little handbook, published in 1828, dealing with the merits of the “New Sulphureous and Saline Baths” that stood opposite the “Four Crosses,” assured all likely and unlikely scrofulous visitors that the waters were just as unpleasing to taste and smell, and inferentially as efficacious, as those of Harrogate itself. Cropper was both proprietor of the new baths and keeper of the inn, somewhat grandiloquently described as the “principal house for the reception of company.” The little shop seen built out from the old “Four Crosses” was a chemist’s, added at that hopeful time. But the Willoughby Spa, although so conveniently situated on the great road, never attracted much custom, and is now quite forgot. The chemist gave up in despair, and his shop was in use as a bar-parlour at the last: the old drug drawers, with their abbreviated Latin labels, remaining until the house was pulled down. Willoughby legends still linger. They tell even yet, of the cross that stood here in the seventeenth century, and of Cromwell’s soldiery, retreating from Edge Hill, tying a rope round the shaft to pull it down, only being dissuaded by the vicar, who diverted their attention with a foaming beer-jug. It is gone now, however, but the date of its disappearance is uncertain. Gone too are the seventeen hundred acres of common land that once belonged to the parish; but their fate is a matter of precise information. They were enclosed in 1758 and the plunder divided, as by law enacted. There was once a “New Inn” between Willoughby and Dunchurch, but it no longer tempts the wayfarer; just as there was a toll-gate at Woolscot, not far beyond, that no longer takes tolls. The toll-house remains, as do certain legends of the ways of Rugby boys with the pikeman; boys and man alike long since ferried across the inky Styx by the grim boatmen.