A curious feature of the old frontage of the “Ostrich” was the doorway made in coaching times in the upper storey for the convenience of passengers, who were in this manner enabled to step directly into the house from the roofs of the coaches. There are those still living who remember this contrivance; but the space has long been filled in, and the sole vestige of it is an unobtrusive wooden sill resting on the timbering beneath the swinging sign. Romance, very dark and gory, clothes the memory of the “Blue Boar” at Leicester, a house unfortunately pulled down in the ’30’s of the nineteenth century. According to tradition, Richard the Third, coming to Leicester and finding the castle already dilapidated, stayed at the inn before the battle of Bosworth, and slept in the huge oaken four-poster bed which remained in the house until the date of its demolition. It was not only a bed, but also a treasure-chest, for in the time of one Clark, who kept the house in the later years of Queen Elizabeth and the earlier part of the reign of James the First, a great store of gold coin was discovered in the framework of it. Mrs. Clark, making up the bed hastily, shook it with more than usual vigour, when, to her surprise, a gold coin dropped out. Examination led to the discovery that the bedstead had a false bottom and that the space between was one vast cash-box. Clark did not at the time disclose the find, and so became “mysteriously” rich. In the course of a few years he was gathered to his fathers, and his widow kept on the house, but was murdered in 1613 for the sake of her gold by a maidservant, who, together with no fewer than seven men accomplices, was duly hanged for the crime. [Illustration: “PIFF’S ELM.”] The difficulty of resolving tradition into fact, of putting a date to legends and tracing them to their origin, is generally insurmountable. Let us take, for example, the “Old White Swan,” at “Piff’s Elm.” Casting a roving eye upon the map of Gloucestershire, I see by chance, between Tewkesbury and Gloucester, a place so named. It tells me vaguely of romance, and I resolve, at all hazards, to go to that spot and sketch, if sketchable, the inn I suspect to be there, and note the story that belongs, or should belong, to it. In due course I come to that lonely place, and there, to be sure, is an inn--once a considerable house on the old coaching and posting route between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury--and not only an inn, but a picturesque one, fronted with the giant stump of an elm--whether Piff’s or another’s, who shall say?