So much for Paine. The street of his birth, the street that leads out of the town on the way to Norwich, is still old-fashioned. There stands yet the old “White Hart,” and a handsome house of two pointed gables, once said to have been the “Fleece.” Lower down, opposite the “Bell,” a house now occupied by an ironmonger was once the “George”; and midway is a pre-eminently ancient building whose age is tacitly recognised as transcendent, in the name of “the old house,” given it locally. Its timbered frontage probably belongs to the fourteenth century. Traces of an old watchman’s box remain, and dark traditions survive of a chain being stretched across the street at night, from this to the opposite house. Something more, perhaps, than tradition, for the staples from which the chain hung are still pointed out. No records remain to tell the why or wherefore of that chain, but we have only to recall the misty past again to find in the solitary position of Thetford, surrounded by heaths—and those heaths frequented, to put it mildly, by undesirables—much virtue in chains, and comfort unspeakable to the listening midnight ears of nightcapped burgesses in the watchman’s resonant “Twelve o’clock, and a starlight night! All’s well.” XXXVIII WHEN the modern tourist leaves Thetford, he does so without a thrill on the threshold, and the only thing to give him pause is the rather bewildering choice of roads on the barren-looking rise where the town ends. Every way leads to open heath, even now, but every turning does not, as of yore, bring you butt against a highwayman. I, for one, do not regret the disappearance of _that_ feature of the old days, and am content to forego all such thrillful encounters. Two miles out of Thetford one came in those old days to the toll-house. The old relic stood until 1902, and was something of a curiosity to the instructed in local lore, for it stood on the boundary of the parishes of Croxton and Kilverstone, on those of the Hundreds of Grimshoe and Shropham and the South-West and Mid Parliamentary Divisions of Norfolk. In virtue of that last distinction the occupier had a vote in both divisions, and was a man greatly cherished and cultivated by parties when election-time drew nigh. [Illustration: “BRIDGEHAM HIGH TREE.”]