Two rural inns, typical in their respective ways of rustic England, are illustrated here. They neighbour one another; the one on the Bath Road at the fifty-fifth mile-stone from London, before entering Newbury, and being, in fact, the half-way house between the General Post Office, London, and the Post Office in Bath; the other but two miles away, at Sandleford Water, where a footbridge and a watersplash on the river Enborne mark the boundaries of Hampshire and Berkshire. Sitting in the arbours of the “Swan,” that looks upon the Bath Road, you may see the traffic of a great highway go by, and at Sandleford Water you have the place wholly to yourself, or share it only with the squirrels and the birds of the overarching trees. There was once an obscure little Priory here, whose every stone has utterly vanished. [Illustration: THE “SWAN,” SANDLEFORD.] [Illustration: THE “SWAN,” NEAR NEWBURY.] [Illustration: THE “JOLLY FARMER,” FARNHAM.] The “Jolly Farmer” inn at Farnham, where William Cobbett was born in 1762, still stands and, overhung as it is with tall trees, and neatly kept, is in every way, we may well suspect, a prettier place than it was in his time. And it is, doubtless, in its way, now a higher-class house; a general levelling up, in the country, of ale-houses, taverns and rustic inns, being always to be borne in mind when we read or write of the rustic wayside inns of a hundred years or so since. You may in these days even play billiards, on a full-size table, at the “Jolly Farmer,” and order strange exotic drinks undreamt of by the rustics of Cobbett’s day. [Illustration: THE “BOAR’S HEAD,” MIDDLETON.] Five and a half miles from Manchester, in the now busy township of Middleton, the old rural “Boar’s Head” inn stands, fronting the main street; a striking anachronism in that twentieth-century manufacturing centre, looking out with its sixteenth-century timbered front upon modern tram-lines and an unlovely commercialism. The projecting sign proclaims it to be that now rare thing among inns, a “Free House.” The sight of that inscription leads inevitably to the thought, how strange it is that in this boasted land of freedom, in this country that freed the black slaves, the “tied-house” system should be allowed, by which brewers can buy licensed premises and insist that their tenants shall sell no other liquors than those they supply. Pity the poor bondsman of a tenant, and still more pity the general public condemned by the system to drink the inferior brews that no one would dare to sell to a free man. The curious late eighteenth-century addition to the “Boar’s Head,” shown in the illustration, was once the local Sessions House, but is now the Assembly Room. [Illustration: THE “OLD HOUSE AT HOME” HAVANT.]