James Hill, a Scotsman, and a painter by trade, went under the assumed names of Hind and John Aitkin. Visiting America, he there acquired a maniacal hatred for England, and returned with the design of setting fire to all our great dockyards, and thus crippling our resources against the foreign foe. On December 7th, 1776, he caused a fire at Portsmouth Dockyard that wrought damage to the extent of £60,000. Arrested at Odiham on February 7th, 1777, he was very speedily brought to trial at Winchester, and executed on March 10th, being afterwards gibbeted, a good deal higher than Haman, at Blockhouse Beach, from the mizzen-mast of the _Arethusa_, especially set up there for the purpose, 64½ feet high. One of the choicest and most thrilful exhibits at the Naval Exhibition of 1891 at Chelsea was a tobacco-stopper made out of a mummified finger of this infernal rascal. The derelict inns of the Exeter Road are not so numerous, but a striking example is found at West Allington, outside Bridport, where the old “Hearts of Oak” stands forlorn, a small portion of it in private occupation and a long range of stables and wayside smithy gradually becoming ruinous and overgrown with ivy. The old lamp remains over the door of the inn, and in it, typical of this picture of ruin, the sparrow has built her nest. The most singular instance of an inn retired from business must surely be that of the “Bell” at Dale, near Derby, but more singular still is the circumstance of its ever having become a public-house, for the building was once actually the guest-house of Dale Abbey. Since it ceased to be a village ale-house, some seventy-six years ago, it has become a farm. [Illustration: THE “HEARTS OF OAK,” NEAR BRIDPORT.] The illustration shows the extraordinary features of the place: on the right-hand the farmhouse portion, which seems, by the evidence of some carving on the gable, to have been partly rebuilt in 1651, and on the left the parish church, surmounted by an eccentric belfry, greatly resembling a dovecote. The interior of this extraordinary and exceedingly diminutive church--one of the smallest in England--is a close-packed mass of timbering and old-fashioned, high, box-like Georgian pews. A little churchyard surrounds church and farmhouse, and in the background are the tree-covered hills that completely enclose this well-named village of “Dale,” an agricultural outpost of Derbyshire, on the very edge of the coal-mining and ironworks districts of Nottinghamshire.