My time in that brave service.
But there is nothing to show how he occupied himself when once again he was restored to society; there is, however, a curious little notice added to the third edition of the Recantation, by the publisher, by which it would seem gossip had been doing an injustice to our sinner repentant. Thus it reads:
"The late and general false report of his relapse and untoward death, made me most willing again to publish this work of his, to let you know he not only lives, but hath also made good all these his promises and strict resolutions: insomuch that it has become very disputable amongst wise men, whether they should most admire his former ill-ways, or his now most singular reformation, whereat no man outjoys his friend and yours.—Richard Meighen."
This brand plucked from the burning appears to have died in 1642.
WILLIAM DAVIS, THE GOLDEN FARMER
There stands on the summit of the steep hill as you go westward out of Bagshot, along the Exeter Road, a commonplace inn at the fork of the roads leading respectively to Camberley and to Frimley. The "Jolly Farmer"—for that is the name of the inn—looks squarely eastward, down the hill, and seems no doubt, to most who pass this way, not worth even a glance. Nor, indeed, is it beautiful or interesting. Its former sign, however,—the sign of the "Golden Farmer"—enshrined an interesting story of the road. The forerunner of the present house stood on the right-hand side of the way, and was named the "Golden Farmer," in allusion to a highwayman, once only too well known in the neighbourhood.
William Davis flourished in the seventeenth century. Born at Wrexham, he was early taken to Sudbury, in Gloucestershire, where he eventually married the daughter of a wealthy innkeeper. He had eighteen children, and it would almost seem, by the tone of his early biographers, that this unfortunate fact went some way towards excusing his career. He was, to the day of his death, a farmer, and for a good many years cultivated land in the neighbourhood of Bagshot; a district remarkable in those times rather for wild heaths than for agricultural value. And long it remained of this character, and infested with highwaymen, for we find the poet Gay in 1715, in his fine narrative poem, A Journey to Exeter, writing: