A catalogue of all the, in some way, odd inns of Chester would of necessity be lengthy; but mention may here be made of the exquisitely restored little “Boot” inn, dated 1643, in Eastgate Street, with a provision-shop below and a “row” running above, and of the red-brick “Pied Bull” and the adjoining stone-pillared “Old Bell”--“licensed 1494”--at the extreme end of Northgate Street. CHAPTER III INNS RETIRED FROM BUSINESS That striking feature of the last few years, the voluntary or the compulsory extinction of licences, with its attendant compensation, has created not a little stir among people with short memories, or no knowledge of their country, who cherish the notion, “once an inn, always an inn,” and forget the wholesale ruin that befell inns all over the land upon the introduction of railways, causing hundreds of hostelries to close their doors. The traveller with an eye for such things may still identify these inns retired from business, chiefly by their old archways and entries into stable-yards, but to the expert, even when those features are absent, there is generally some indefinable air about a house once an inn that singles it out from others. Such an one is the immense, four-square, red-brick farm-house midway between Lichfield and Burton-on-Trent, once a coaching- and posting-house famous in all that countryside as the “Flitch of Bacon”; such was the exclusive “Verulam Arms” at St. Albans, where mere plebeian coach-passengers wore not suffered, and only the high and mighty who could afford post-chaises were condescended to. The “Verulam Arms” had, however, the briefest of careers. Built in 1827, railways ruined it in ten years, and, shorn of its vast stables, on whose site a church has been built, it has ever since been in private occupation. In short, along the whole course of the Holyhead Road the inns retired from business are an especial feature, the village of Little Brickhill being little else than a place of old hostelries and taverns of every class, whose licences have long ago been surrendered, for lack of custom. Thus you may travel through to Anglesey and be continually passing these evidences of the ruin caused by railways, once so distressing to many interests, and a pitiful commentary upon the activity of inventors; but long ago fallen back into that historical perspective in which ruin and wrong become the sign-posts of “progress.” The chief inns that are inns no longer on this north-western road through England are numerous; the minor taverns and ale-houses that have closed their doors innumerable. Among others, we have--speaking merely at a venture--the aristocratic “Bull’s Head,” Meriden, the “Haygate” inn, near Wellington, the “Talbot,” Atcham, “Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and “Prince Llewelyn,” Cernioge--all establishments of the first order; and if we turn to the Great North Road, a very similar state of things is found. On that great highway the famous “Haycock” inn