Aylsham once manufactured linen and worsted, and the “lineners” and worsted-weavers contributed greatly to the building of its fine church, a church packed away inconspicuously in a corner off the Market Square; but those old trades are dead now, and only the weekly market keeps the little town alive. You enter the place along a street once called “the straits,” and still remarkably narrow, past the old coaching-inn, the “Dog”; but the little town does not fully disclose itself along this narrow way, for its central point and focus is the Market Square, reached on the left by a short and narrow street. Here stands that curious old early seventeenth-century brick inn, the “Black Boys,” remarkable for its coved eaves, still bearing the old decorative design that gave the house its name. This is a device of foliage and fruit, painted and gilt, running the two sides of the house, with three little black, impish-looking figures in the centre of the side facing the square and one at each corner, all blowing gilded horns. They look like the “little demons” of Ingoldsby’s “Truants,” who had “broken loose from the National School below,” but they are really only intended for representations of Bacchus, and thus by a side-wind, as it were, to hint to travellers of old of the good cheer of the house. L THE “Black Boys” owes its existence on this scale to the near neighbourhood of Blickling Hall, perhaps the most famous mansion in Norfolk, and certainly the most beautiful and stately. Blickling is scarce a mile distant, and is so small a village that it must have been to Aylsham in general, and to the “Black Boys” in particular, the custom fell in those old days when the Hobarts of Blickling Hall entertained so royally. We cannot forbear visiting Blickling, for not merely Hobarts, but Anne Boleyn herself, most unhappy of queens, is associated with that noble pile and has made it historic.