A house rural now that the old semi-urban character of the great road to Oxford has, with the passing of the coaches and the post-chaises, long become merely a memory is the great “George and Dragon” inn at West Wycombe. West Wycombe once called itself a town, and perhaps does so still, but it cannot nowadays make that claim convincingly. If we call it a decayed coaching town, that is the most that can be conceded, in the urban way; for to-day its every circumstance is rustic. The “George and Dragon,” a glance at its upstanding, imposing front is sufficient to show, was built for the accommodation of the great, or at any rate for those who were great enough to be able to command the price of chaise-and-four and sybarite accommodation; but the passing stranger would nowadays be unlikely to secure any better meal than bread and cheese, and the greater part of the house is silence and emptiness, while the once bustling yard has subsided into that condition of picturesque decrepitude which, however pleasing to the artist, tells of business decay. [Illustration: YARD OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WEST WYCOMBE.] It is, indeed, remarkable what picturesqueness lingers in the courtyards of old inns. The front of the house may have been modernised, or in some way smartened up, but the old gables and the casement windows are still generally to be found in the rear, and sometimes the local church-tower comes in, across the roof-tops, in a partly benedictory and wholly sketchable way, as at the village of Dedham, near Colchester, where the yard of the “Sun” inn and the church-tower combine to make a very fine composition. A relic of the bygone coaching days of Dedham remains, in the small oval spy-hole cut through the wall on either side of the tap-room bay-window, and glazed, commanding views up and down the village street, so that the approach of coaches coming either way might be clearly seen. [Illustration: THE YARD OF THE “SUN,” DEDHAM.] [Illustration: THE “OLD SHIP,” WORKSOP.]