“What stories this old Inn could recount if it had the power of language!” exclaims the leaflet sold at the “Seven Stars” itself. The reflection is sufficiently trite and obvious. What stories could not any building tell, if it were so gifted? But fortunately, although walls metaphorically have ears, they have not--even in literary imagery--got tongues, and so cannot blab. And well too, for if they could and did, what a cloud of witness there would be, to be sure. Not an one of us would get a hearing, and not a soul be safe. But what stories, in more than one sense, Harrison Ainsworth told! He told a tale of Guy Fawkes, in which that hero of the mask, the dark-lantern and the powder-barrel escaped, and made his way to the “Seven Stars,” to be concealed in a room now called “Ye Guy Fawkes Chamber.” Ye gods! [Illustration: THE OLDEST LICENSED HOUSE IN GREAT BRITAIN: THE “SEVEN STARS,” MANCHESTER.] We know perfectly well that he did not escape, and so was not concealed in a house to which he could not come, but--well, there! Such fantastic tales, adopted by the house, naturally bring suspicion upon all else; and the story of the horse-shoe upon one of its wooden posts is therefore, rightly or wrongly, suspect. This is a legend that tells how, in 1805, when we were at war with Napoleon, the Press Gang was billeted at the “Seven Stars,” and seized a farmer’s servant who was leading a horse with a cast shoe along Withy Grove. The Press Gang could not legally press a farm-servant, but that probably mattered little, and he was led away; but, before he went, he nailed the cast horse-shoe to a post, exclaiming, “Let this stay till I come from the wars to claim it!” He never returned, and the horse-shoe remains in its place to this day. The room adjoining the Bar parlour is called nowadays the “Vestry.” It was, according to legends, the meeting-place of the Watch, in the old days before the era of police; and there they not only met, but stayed, the captain ever and again rising, with the words, “Now we will have another glass, and then go our rounds”; upon which, emptying their glasses, they all would walk round the tables and then re-seat themselves. A great deal of old Jacobean and other furniture has been collected, to fill the rooms of the “Seven Stars,” and in the “Vestry” is the “cupboard that has never been opened” within the memory of living man. It is evidently not suspected of holding untold gold. Relics from the New Bailey Prison, demolished in 1872, are housed here, including the doors of the condemned cell, and sundry leg-irons; and genuine Carolean and Cromwellian tables are shown. The poet who wrote of some marvellously omniscient personage-- And still the wonder grew That one small head could carry all he knew, would have rejoiced to know the “Seven Stars,” and might have been moved to write a similar couplet, on how much so small a house could be made to hold. CHAPTER II THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF INNS