For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road, which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The "Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one that is most quaintly out of proportion, with a head and neck less than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part of innkeepers along the Norwich Road. [Illustration: CHIPPING HILL.] Those who would seek the site of the original Witham must turn aside from the high road the matter of half a mile, past the railway station, to Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a camp successively occupied and wrought upon by the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons, it will be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant valley of that triply-named river already mentioned, in 1749 described by Walpole as "the prettiest little winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to this day, and as sweet, and the by-road that comes up from the gravelly hollow and cuts through the earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold climbs up romantically under the blossoming limes into as pretty a picture in the rural sort as you shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old England before railways came, or science and the ten thousand plagues of modern life, and the cheap builder of hideous new cottages were let loose upon the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in the picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old dwellings, flint-built church tower and red-brick rectory, set in, upon and around the swelling grassy banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had both their fortress and their market, as evidenced by the still surviving name of Chipping, or Market Hill.