Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both started from London at 5.30 a.m. The "Day" coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the "Times" ten minutes later, neither having stopped for changing horses during the last twenty-five miles. This was a "record" for that period, the usual time being fourteen hours. Probably the would-be passengers had to remain the night; a fate which no one who has done the like of late would be apt to complain of. The guest at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in the lofty sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique plated candlesticks, and with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century beauties of the Lely type gazing down upon him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly as though he were living in another era; a feeling that grows as he wanders upstairs to bed, almost losing himself in the roomy corridors. When he has closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant clang, and, creeping into the generous embraces of a damask-hung four-poster that may have been new a century and a half ago, gazes reflectively about the panelled room and on the curiously coffered ceiling, he drops off to sleep straightway into the times when the inn was new-built and dreams of how the news of the Restoration may have come to Scole in 1661. Old times live again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has Been is enacted again, with all the convincing air of such visions. Post-chaises and chariots clatter up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper to the consciousness that the sound is but that of a jolting rustic tumbril going down the road in the early morning; that this is the twentieth century, and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back eddy of life. [Illustration: STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."] Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at Scole. The plain flint tower of the church stands by the roadside, on the ascent that leads from the village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic shops and cottages, and a private residence or so make up the tale. Scole, in fact, has not grown greatly since when it was a Roman station, and when the Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near the river occupied the military post on the long road to Venta Icenorum.