And respectable obscurity has ever been the distinguishing characteristic of Godalming. At intervals, indeed, we hear of it as the site of a hunting-lodge of the Merry Monarch; and once, in 1726, "Godliman" (as the vulgar tongue had it then)[3] was the scene of a most remarkable imposture; but, generally speaking, the town lived on, the world forgetting and by the world forgot, saving only those whose business carried them here by coach on their way to or from Portsmouth; and Godalming remained in their memories chiefly, no doubt, by reason of the excellent fare dispensed at the "King's Arms," where the coaches stopped. The "King's Arms" is there to this day, in one of the passage-like streets by the Market House; this last quite a curiosity in its way. The "King's Arms," doubtless so called from the frequent visits of Charles II. and his Court on their hunting expeditions, has a quite wonderful range of stables and outhouses, reached through a great doorway from the street, through which the mails and stages passed in days when road-travel was your only choice who journeyed to and fro in the land. It is a matter of sixty years since those capacious stalls and broad-paved yards witnessed the stir and bustle of the stablemen, coachmen, post-boys, and all the horsey creatures who found employment in the care of coach and horses, and they are so many lumber-rooms to-day. [Illustration: MARKET-HOUSE, GODALMING.] But Godalming was a place notorious in the eighteenth century as the scene of one of the most impudent frauds ever practised upon the credulity of mankind. There have been those who have said that such trickery as that to which Mary Tofts, the "rabbit-breeder" of Godalming, lent herself, would meet with no success in so enlightened an age as this; but in so saying those folk have done a little less than justice to the eighteenth century, and have been particularly lenient to the nineteenth, which has proved itself, in the matter of Mahatmas, at least as credulous as by-gone ages were. [Sidenote: _MARY TOFTS_]