The old church of this scattered village looks down upon the road from its slightly elevated situation at a point where the remains of the old highway, re-modelled over two hundred years ago, may yet be seen. The name of “highway” in a descriptive sense is, however, wholly misleading, for it plunges down between the church and the present road in the likeness of a broad and deep ditch. This hollow way, with its overhanging banks, proclaims, more than anything else can do, the dangers of bygone times, when travellers “travailed,” and a journey was really and truly what that word etymologically means, an expedition made by _day_. In these hollow ways lurked of old those outlaws who made even daylight travel perilous, and we can readily believe it was with dismay that benighted travellers saw the sun go down, and, simultaneously with its disappearance below the horizon, felt their courage ooze out at their boots. Trees and bushes now grow in the hollow where our forefathers of more than two centuries ago went so fearfully. It is long since it was used, and all who used it are gone, but Romance lives there, immortal, with the mud of years and the decaying leaves of autumn past. The curious device of a dove and two serpents forms the weather-vane of Hethersett church. The living is in the gift of Caius College, Cambridge, and the vane displays the crest of Dr. John Caius, the re-founder of the College, officially and fully styled “Gonville and Caius.” It was in 1561 that the Heralds’ College found a crest for that worthy man: “a clove argent, bekyd and membred gewles, holding in his beke by the stalke, flower gentle in proper colour, stalked vert.” “Flower gentle” is the old heraldic term for the wild amaranth, the “love lies bleeding” of old-fashioned gardens. In heraldic lore, it signified, as the grant of arms to Caius states, “immortalite that shall never fade.” The two serpents denote wisdom and grace. [Illustration: HETHERSETT VANE.]