A little grim, too, is the jest upon the sign-board of the “Chequer’s” inn at Slapestones, near Osmotherley, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. It reads:
Be not in haste,
Come in and taste.
Ale to-morrow for nothing.
But “to-morrow never comes.”
The Slapestones inn is not remarkable on account of its architecture. Indeed, with a box of toy bricks, as used in building operations conducted in the nursery, you could readily contrive a likeness of it; but it has a kind of local celebrity, both on account of the cakes baked upon its old-fashioned hearth, and by reason of that fire itself, traditionally said never to have been once quenched during the last 130 years. Moreover, the spot is a favourite meet for the Bilsdale Hounds.
A former landlord of the inn at Croyde, near Ilfracombe, must have been a humourist in his way, and probably had read Pickwick before he composed the following, which, like “Bill Stumps his Mark”—
+
BILST
UM
PSHI
S.M.
ARK
—is easily to be rendered into English:
Here’s to Pands Pen
Das Oci Al Hourin
Ha! R: M: Les Smir
Thand Funlet
Fri Ends Hipre:
Ign Be Ju!
Stand Kin
Dan Devils
Peak of No! ne.
The composition of this could have been no great tax on the tapster’s brain.
More pleasing is the queerly spelled old notice displayed on the exterior of the “Plough” at Ford, near Stow-on-the-Wold: