Apart from this unfounded claim, the “White Hart” is pictorially remarkable for its White Hart effigy, of an enormous size in proportion to that of the house. CHAPTER IX INNS OF OLD ROMANCE Romance, as we have already seen, was enacted in many ways in the inns of long ago. Love and hatred, comedy and tragedy, and all the varied moods by which human beings are swayed, have had their part beneath the roofs of the older hostelries; as how could they fail to do in those times when the inn was so essential and intimate a part of the national life? The romantic incidents in which old inns have their part are in two great divisions: that of old folklore, and the other of real life. To the realm of folk-tales belongs the story told of an ancient hostelry that stood on the site of the “Ostrich,” Colnbrook. The decayed coaching town of Colnbrook, in Middlesex, seventeen miles from Hyde Park Corner, on the great road to Bath, is little changed from the time when the coaches ceased running through it, seventy years ago. Still do the old red-brick houses on either side of the narrow, causeway-like street wear their seventeenth, their eighteenth, or their early nineteenth-century look unchanged, and the solid, stolid red-faced “George” inn yet seems to be awaiting the arrival of the mail, or of some smart post-chaise nearing London or setting out on the second stage of the 105¾ miles to Bath. Colnbrook is perhaps the best illustration of a coaching town ruined by railways that it is possible to discover, and certainly the nearest to London. How great its fall since those prosperous days of 1549, when it was incorporated as a market-town! Its charter was renewed in 1632, and, judging from the many houses in its narrow street built about 1700-1750, the prosperity of the place survived unimpaired for certainly considerably over another century. It is now merely a village, but, as a result of its former highway importance, still a place of inns. There are at least ten even now surviving; and it is quite safe to assume that any important-looking old house, now in private occupation, facing the long thoroughfare, was once a hostelry. The “George,” already mentioned, although re-fronted at some period of the eighteenth century, is older within, and an old gable overlooking the stable yard even has a sixteenth-century barge-board surviving. Of rather more human interest is the decorative and spiky iron-work fixed on the ground-floor window-sills of the frontage, which clearly shows that the architect of the building, when he drew out his design, had forgotten the loungers of Colnbrook, and, in placing his sills at the height above the ground of the average chair, had unwittingly provided the lazy with seats in the most advantageous position. Hence the afterthought of the decorative but penetrative ironwork.