If the “King’s Head” of fact--“such a delicious old inn opposite the churchyard,” as Dickens wrote of it to Forster--is not so wonderful an old house as the “Maypole” of fiction and of Cattermole’s picturesque fancy, we must, at any rate, excuse the artist, who was under the necessity of working up to the fervid description of it with which the story begins: “An old building, with more gable-ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there, was a legend, not only that Queen Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay-window, but that next morning, while standing upon a mounting-block before the door, with one foot in the stirrup, the virgin monarch had then and there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty.” [Illustration: THE “KING’S HEAD,” CHIGWELL, THE “MAYPOLE” OF _BARNABY RUDGE_.] Passing the references to sunken and uneven floors and old diamond-paned lattices, with another to an “ancient porch, quaintly and grotesquely carved,” which does not exist, we come to a description of dark red bricks, grown yellow with age, decayed timbers, and ivy wrapping the time-worn walls,--all figments of the imagination. The real “Maypole,” identified with the “King’s Head” at Chigwell, in Epping Forest, is not the leastest littlest bit like that. The laziest man on the hottest day could easily count its gables, which number three large ones[17] and a small would-be-a-gable-if-it-could, that looks as though it were blighted in its youth and had never grown to maturity. The front of the house is not of red brick, and never was: the present white plaster face being a survival of its early years; while the front of the ground-floor is weather-boarded. But it is a delightful old house, in a situation equally delightful, standing opposite the thickly wooded old churchyard of Chigwell, just as described in the story; the sign--a portrait head of Charles the First--projecting from an iron bracket, and the upper storeys of the inn themselves set forward, on old carved oak beams and brackets. There is no sign of decay or neglect about the “King’s Head.”