Dedham, however, is very far from being exceptionally fortunate among Essex villages, in retaining old inns. It is an old-world county, largely off the beaten track, and offering few inducements to the innovator. Among the many humble old Essex inns the “Dial House” at Bocking, adjoining Braintree, is notable; for although it is now only an ale-house, the elaborately panelled and sculptured Renaissance oak of the tap-room walls indicates a bygone grandeur whose history cannot now be even surmised. Local records do not tell us the story of the “Dial House” before it became an inn. The sign, it should be said, derives from an old sundial on the wail. A curious contrivance may be noticed in one of the old wooden seats in the tap-room; a circular hole, with a drawer below. The purpose at first sight seems mysterious; but it appears that this is the simple outfit for that ancient, and now illegal, game, shove-halfpenny. A recent visit discloses the fact that all the beautiful panelling of the “Dial House” has now been sold and removed. [Illustration: THE “OLD SWAN,” ATHERSTONE.] The uniquely projecting porch of the “Old Ship” at Worksop, and the old gabled house behind it, still keep a rustic air in the streets of that growing town, just as the “Old Swan” at Atherstone, restored in a judiciously conservative manner, will long serve to maintain memories of the old England of four hundred years ago. All the old inns of the decayed port of Sandwich have, by dint of the fallen circumstances of that once busy haven, become, with all their surroundings, rural. Golfers have of late years enlivened the surroundings of Sandwich, and partly peopled the empty streets, but commerce has for ever forsaken this old Cinque Port. In one of the most silent streets stands the inn now known as the “King’s Arms,” although, according to the date of 1592 on the richly carved angle-post of the building, and with the additional evidence of the Royal Arms supported by the Red Dragon of the Tudors, it was erected in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The grotesque figure carved in high relief on the angle-post appears to be a Tudor Renaissance combination of Sun-god and the great god Pan. The front of the house is covered with plaster, but there can be little doubt that here, beneath that coating, as in numberless other instances, a good half-timbered construction awaits discovery. Already, when the “King’s Arms” was built, Sandwich haven was being choked with the sand and shingle brought by the Channel currents, and the seaport was seen to be doomed to extinction. He was, therefore, a rash man who then built anew here, and few indeed have been the new houses since then. A characteristic old inn of Sandwich is the queer old house with peaked gables, contemporary with the “King’s Arms,” bearing the sign of the “Malt Shovel,” and exhibiting one of those implements of the maltster’s trade over the doorway.