Dunchurch, in the old coaching days, was a place of many and good inns: all of them, however, excelled by the “Dun Cow,” almost the sole remaining member of the herd of “White Lions,” “Red Lions,” “Blue Boars,” “Green Men,” and such-like zoological curiosities that once thronged it. There was an excellent reason for such wealth of accommodation, for the village was situated not only on the Holyhead Road, but at the intersection of it by the Oxford and Leicester Road, along which plied a goodly throng of traffic. On that road lies Rugby, three miles away, and along it went, among other forgotten conveyances, the “Regulator”—“young gents calls it the ‘Pig and Whistle,’” remarked the guard of the coach that conveyed young Tom Brown from London to Dunchurch. Rugby and its famous school have made a vast difference to this village, now postally “Dunchurch, near Rugby,” but formerly the post-town whence the once insignificant village of Rugby—Rugby-under-Dunchurch was served. The “Dun Cow,” survivor and representative of the jolly days of old, takes its name from the mythical monster of a cow slain, according to confused and contradictory legends, upon Dunsmore by the almost equally mythical Guy of Warwick. [Illustration: DUNCHURCH.] Steadfastly regarding the old inn, and with its back turned upon the church, the white marble effigy of “the Right Honble. Lord John Douglas Montagu Douglas Scott” cuts a ludicrous figure in the centre of the village. The work of an Associate of the Royal Academy, it simply serves to point to what depths the art of sculpture had descended in the early Sixties, when it was wrought. The inscription states that Lord Douglas Scott died in 1860, and that the statue “was erected by his tenantry in affectionate memory of him.” The clothes worn at that period give, of course, their own element of grotesqueness to the statue; but the heavy mass of fringed drapery that Lord John is represented to be carrying under his arm has occasioned the derisive query, “Who stole the altar-cloth?” [Illustration: LORD JOHN SCOTT’S STATUE.] Dunchurch, besides being a sweetly pretty place, rejoices in a number of minor curiosities. The beautiful church has one, in the eccentric monument of Thomas Newcombe, King’s Printer in the reigns of Charles II., James II., and William III. It is in the shape of folding-doors of white marble. In the churchyard, too, he who searches in the right place will discover the epitaph of Daniel Goode, who died in 1751, “A Ged year 25.” The advice given is better than the jingle to which it is set:— To all young men That me survive Who dyed at less Than twenty-five, I do this Good Advice declare: That they live in God’s faith and fear.