That galleries open to the air, with the bedrooms and others giving upon them, were not so inconvenient as generally nowadays supposed is evident enough here, where they are still in use, as they were centuries ago. The only difference is that they are carpeted nowadays, instead of being bare floors. A staircase from the courtyard leads up to the first-floor gallery, still screened off by the old open-lattice gates reaching from floor to ceiling, originally intended to prevent stray dogs entering. Portions of the “New Inn” let off in the days of its declining prosperity have in modern times been taken back again: among them the large dining-hall overlooking the lane, for many years used as a Sunday school for the children of St. Nicholas parish, and other rooms looking upon Northgate Street. In short, the old “New” inn impresses the beholder with a very insistent sense of being a live institution, a “going concern.” Most ancient inns of this character are merely poor survivals; archæologically interesting, but wan veterans tottering to decay and long deserted by custom. Here, however, there is heavy traffic down in the yard: the ostler is busy in his “Ostry” (the name is painted over the door), bells are ringing, people and luggage coming and going; the big railway parcel-office is as full of parcels as it could have been when it was a coach-office; appetising scents come from glowing kitchens, and to and from private rooms are carried trays of as good things as ever pilgrims feasted upon, at the end of their pilgrimage. There existed, until about 1859, another very notable “New” inn, probably the work of the Abbots of Sherborne, and intended for the reception of visitors to that beautiful Dorsetshire abbey. That splendid old hostelry, with a noble front of yellow sandstone, built in the Perpendicular style of architecture, probably about 1420, was the finest example of an inn of its period in England, but it was ruthlessly, and with incredible stupidity, demolished, and the only pictorial record of it appears to be an entirely inadequate, severe, and unsympathetic little wood-cut in Parker’s _Domestic Architecture_.[13] It figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s story of _The Woodlanders_ as the “Earl of Wessex” inn at “Sherton Abbas.”