Similarly, the next year, he found the July heat almost beyond endurance. “I almost melted away,” he tells Polly, “from the extreme of a suffocating heat before I arrived at Cobham, and a large bowl of lemonade was scarcely sufficient to wash away the dust, which I had been champing for above three hours.” A Mr. Hervey, “brother-in-law to Mr. Lambe, a silversmith, and Common Councilman of my ward,” was at that time landlord of the “White Hart,” at Cobham. “I was well used by him,” says Wilkes, “and the house has a very decent appearance, but the poor fellow had tears in his eyes when he told me of thirty-five horse quartered on him.” When he reached Liphook, what with two hounds, chained together in the outhouses of the “Anchor,” yelping all night, and the intolerable heat, the patriot had no sleep the livelong night, and so resorted to his post-chaise and departed for Portsmouth at an early hour of the morning.
Those were busy days in the history of the “Anchor,” and the constant stream of poorer wayfarers added to the bustle. Poor folk took a shake-down, with what grace they might summon up, in some clean straw on the floor of outhouses and barns, and in this manner slept the sailor-men who were continually tramping up the road or down. Not that sailors were necessarily poor, but the bedrooms that held royalty were judged to be above the tastes and circumstances of poor Jack, to whom, certainly, clean straw in a barn would seem at any rate infinitely better than the gloomy forecastle which he had just left.
DECADENCE
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.
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