Hollingshead, writing of saffron cultivation, calls the farmers of it “crokers.” It was a culture that must then have earned many a fortune, and so late as 1717 it was worth £1 6_s._ 6_d._ a pound; but, what with that curse of all industries, over-production, the carelessness of the growers, and shameless adulteration, price and quality declined. Then, too, the dependence of medicine upon the old herbalists began to decay, and the reputation of saffron fell off to such an extent that by 1790 it was no longer cultivated at Walden, and the “crokers” were in another sense justified of their name. Nowadays saffron is chiefly used as a colouring material for aromatic confections, for liqueurs and varnishes. Put in common cakes, that prove to have been made of something suspiciously like sawdust and paste, the yellow hue it gives produces a specious and illusory richness only discovered too late XVI WE regain the high road at Littlebury, a rural village whose church is said to be built within the lines of a Roman encampment. It may be so, but the Eye of Faith is required to perceive any relics of it, although the natural hillock it stands upon, overlooking the river Cam, must be the “little bury” of the Saxon, once guarding the passage of that stream, and whose title has now crystallised into the place-name. Littlebury was the birthplace of Winstanley, the cocksure and unfortunate designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse, who perished with the destruction of his building. The house where he was born was pulled down many years ago, and it is ill work questing for the site of it. Your ordinary villager is no hero-worshipper, and fails to understand such a search as this. His mind is evenly divided in speculating whether you be a fool or a rogue, and all he has to say is, “I’ve lived here arl me loife, and niver hard tell on’t. Pirraps they knaws him at the Post Orfice.” But they don’t. The only person whom the present writer met at Littlebury who did know was stone deaf, and questions had to be put by the slow and cumbrous process of writing. The house stood on the right-hand side of the cross-road that goes from the church to the water-mill. Its site is now a little elm-covered mound in a meadow. Passing from here along the river-bordered road, within sight of Little Chesterford, we leave Essex and come into Cambridgeshire, where the village of Great Chesterford is planted down on the further side of the river Cam. A gaunt fork of the roads here presents itself to the view, with an ugly inn at the parting of the ways, a shattered windmill to the left, on a hillside, and the railway running on to Cambridge through Great Chesterford station, with a forest of tall signal-posts outlined against the sky, and the puffings, snortings, and crashings of trains sounding continually, far into the night.