[6] He was here also in 1661, giving a very amusing account of how he was entertained, and how he kissed and sang and danced: it is too long, though, for quotation here. But look it up.
[7] Mr. Gladstone has said, most notoriously, that to be “hemmed in” is not to be “surrounded.” But that was part of the political game of bluff, and may not be regarded as a contribution to philology.
[8] An excellent story is told of the cold that rages up here in the winter. It belongs to coaching times, and was told by a coachman who had a new guard with him one frosty night, when the temperature was going down to 15°; a cockney guard who was unused to exposure, and who, moreover, had not the experience which led the Jehu to wrap himself up in layers of flannel, a many-caped coat, and three or four waistcoats. “Ain’t it cold?” asked the guard several times, climbing over the coach roof with numbed hands and blue nose. “Cold!” returned the coachman, “not at all.” “That’s all very well,” says the guard, “but your eyes are watering like hanythink.” “Oh! are they?” rejoins the coachman, “I suppose that’s the perspiration!”
[9] There are “Mockbeggars” in Kent, as in most other counties. There is one near Rochester. Some old buildings pulled down in 1771 at Brighthelmstone were called Mockbeggars. Local opinion held the belief that there had been a Mendicant Priory, but this was not generally credited. The name seems to have been generally applied to objects wearing at some distance the appearance of an hospitable mansion, to which travellers would be drawn out of their road only to meet with a disappointment in finding an empty house, or no house at all. Two such places, so called, are to be instanced: one is an isolated rock at Bakewell in Derbyshire, presenting from the road the semblance of a house, to which it is said beggars and tramps wend their way, only to be mocked by a freak of nature: seeking for bread they find, literally, a stone. The other is an old Tudor mansion, called Mockbeggar Hall, at Claydon in Suffolk, standing in a conspicuous situation, near the road leading from Ipswich to Scole; a place to which mendicants would naturally be attracted, in expectation of finding inhabitants there, but which has, according to tradition, remained so long unoccupied as to have earned its name a hundred years, or more, ago.
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