Forty-one years after Turpin had been hanged we find the “Spaniards” in touch with actual, unquestionable history. June, 1780, was the time of the “No Popery Riots” in London, when Newgate was fired by the mob, and half a million pounds’ worth of damage was done to business houses and private residences. The Earl of Mansfield’s town house, in Bloomsbury Square, was destroyed, and the mob, pleased with their handiwork there, determined to complete their revenge on the obnoxious judge by treating his country mansion at Caen Wood in the same manner. Caen Wood still stands hard by the “Spaniards,” which you must pass in order to come to it from London. Here the landlord stood, with the tollbar behind him, like another Horatius in the gate, and met the rioters as they came with pikes and “No Popery” flags, and torches and firelocks, streaming along the road. They were an unsuspicious mob, and a thirsty, and when mine host invited them to partake of his best, free of charge, and even to wallow in it, if they would, they did not stop to ask the motive of such extraordinary generosity, but took him at his word and sat boozing there until the detachment of Horse Guards, sent up in response to the mounted messenger despatched by the landlord, had time to dispose themselves in the Caen Wood grounds, and so to overawe their undisciplined force. A very great deal of the “Spaniards’” picturesqueness is due to the rustic setting of narrow lane and tall elms that frames it in, but that story of the resourceful landlord and his artful way with those London furies gives the house and the scenery a final dramatic touch. You fancy, if you stroll that way some June evening, that you see him, in old-fashioned dress--buckled shoes, worsted stockings, knee-breeches, scrubby wig--standing in the roadway, tankard in one hand, churchwarden pipe in the other, with assumed joviality confronting a rabble in equal parts drunk and mad. You see the banner, “No Popery!” you hear the curses and--without the aid of imagination, for the “Spaniards” is a going concern--smell the drink. And presently you hear the gallop of the Horse Guards and the rattle and jingle of their accoutrements. But you must not by any means come here on Easter Monday or any other occasion of popular holiday, for amidst such wholesale merry-making imagination becomes atrophied, and the ghosts of historic drama will not condescend to share the stage with twentieth-century comedy. _Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._ INDEX Adelphi Hotel, Adelphi, i. 212, 264 Ale-stakes, i. 14-17 Anchor, Ripley, ii. 212, 242 Angel, Basingstoke, ii. 279 -- Bury St. Edmunds, i. 238 -- Colchester, i. 90 -- Ferrybridge, ii. 81 -- Grantham, i. 118-123 -- Guildford, ii. 57 -- Islington, i. 119 -- Stilton, ii. 48 Ass-in-the-Bandbox, Nidd, ii. 203 Barge Aground, Brentford, ii. 203 -- Stratford High Road, ii. 203