But if the sailors a hundred years ago, or thereby, were denied the luxuries of sheets and coverlets, they were free to drink as much as they pleased at the public bar, so long as they had the wherewithal to settle the score. Rowlandson, who travelled this very road, has left a sketch of "Sailors Carousing," by which you can see that Jack was, at any rate, not one of Luther's fools, for the picture shows that he loved "women, wine, and song" to a riotous extent. And Jack come home from a long cruise, with prize-money in his pockets, was as ostentatious as any _nouveau riche_. He would damn expense with any lord, and has been known to call for sandwiches at the "Anchor" to place five-pound notes between, and to eat the whole with an insane bravado. [Illustration: SAILORS CAROUSING. _From a Sketch by Rowlandson._] Those brave days were done when the railway came and left the roads silent and deserted. Old inns sank into obscurity and neglect, and for many years afterwards the sight of a solitary stranger wanting a bed for the night would have aroused excitement in a place where, in the old days, one more or less was a matter of little import. The "Anchor" for a time shared the fate of its fellows, and its condition in 1865 is eloquently pictured by the Hon. Grantley Berkeley. He says-- "I was travelling about the country, and it so happened that railway time, as well as inevitable time, chose to make me 'The sport of circumstances, when Circumstances seemed most the sport of men,' and I found myself belated and tired in the vicinity of the little rural village of Liphook, on the borders of Hampshire and Surrey, and forced by time and circumstances to put up at a well-known inn. "Now, time was when no traveller would have found fault with this, for the inn I thus allude to was then the great posting and coaching house of 'the road,' and the roar of wheels and the cries of 'first and second turn out,' either 'up or down,' rang through the merry air, and kept the locality in loud and continuous bustle, night and day. Now, however, the glory of the roadside inn was gone; its site seemed changed to grief, and the great elm tree[4] that had formerly during the heat of summer shed a cooling shade over panting steeds and thirsty, dusty-booted men, luxuriously grasping a fresh-drawn tankard of ale, stood sorrowing over the grave of the posting and coaching trade, a tearful mourner on every rainy day. "There were the long ranges of stables, once filled by steeds of every step and temper, curious specimens of every blemish under the sun. Some that ran away the whole way, others that would be run away with by the rest of the team; some that kept the whip in action to send them to the collar, and others that kept the whip still, lest its touch should shut them up to stopping, and give them no collar at all.