Next our wanderings led us into an old graveyard to see the last resting-place of a famous Stamford native, whose size was his fame! His tombstone inscription tells its own story without any further comment of mine, and thus it runs:—
In Remembrance of
That Prodigy in Nature
Daniel Lambert
who was possessed of
An exalted and convivial mind
And in personal greatness
Had no Competitor
He measured three feet one inch round the leg
Nine feet four inches round the body
And Weighed
Fifty-two stone Eleven pounds!
He departed this life
On the 21st of June
1803
Aged 39 years.
“An exalted and convivial mind” is good, it is a phrase worth noting. Our good-natured guide informed us that after the death of this worthy citizen his stockings were kept for many years hung up in a room of one of the inns as a curiosity, and that he distinctly remembered being taken there by his father when a boy, and being placed inside one of the stockings.
After this in a different part of the town we had
A HUNTED KING!
pointed out to us “Barn Hill House,” an old gray stone building more interesting historically than architecturally, for it was within its walls that Charles I. slept his last night “as a free man.” He arrived there disguised as a servant, and entered by the back-door—a hunted king! Such are the chances and changes of fate: the ruler of a kingdom coming stealthily in by a back-door, and seeking shelter and safety in the house of a humble subject, clad in the lowly garb of a serving-man! But I am moralising, a thing I dislike when others do it! possibly through having an overdose thereof when I was a boy, for almost every book I had, it seemed to me, concluded with a moral; till at last, I remember, I used first to look at the end of any new work that was given to me, and if I found the expected moral there, I troubled it no further!
We were shown much more of interest in Stamford, a town every square yard of which is history; but space forbids a detailed description of all we saw. One old house we were taken over had a very quaint and finely-enriched plaster ceiling, for builders of ancient homes did not believe in a flat void of whitewash. The ornaments of this ceiling were rendered in deep relief, the chief amongst them being animals playfully arranged; for instance there was, I remember, a goose in the centre of one panel with a fox greedily watching it on either side; another panel showed a poor mouse with two cats eyeing it on either hand; then there was a hare similarly gloated over by two hounds; and so forth. We visited the site of the castle and saw the last bit of crumbling wall left of the once imposing stronghold, also the small remains of old St. Stephen’s gate: then we returned to our hotel, our good-natured antiquarian friend still keeping us company.
Reaching the bridge that crosses the Welland river, which structure has taken the place of the “stone-ford,” we had pointed out to us a line marked upon it with an inscription, showing the height of the water at the spot during the memorable flood of 15th July 1880, when the swollen river rose above the arches of the bridge. On that occasion, we learnt, our inn was flooded, the water reaching even to the top of the billiard-table. During a former great flood in the seventeenth century, we were told, the horses in the “George” stables were actually drowned at their stalls.
At our inn we reluctantly parted company with our entertaining companion, not, however, before we had thanked him for his kindness to us as strangers. It is these pleasant chance acquaintances the wanderer so frequently makes that add a wonderful zest to the pleasures of travel.
The sign of the “George” inn, as of old, still hangs from the centre of a beam that stretches right across the roadway; it is said that there are only some twenty-five or twenty-seven signs remaining in England so arranged. At the village of Barley in Herts, on the highway from London to Cambridge, the “Fox and Hounds” possesses one of these signs. Here may be seen figures of huntsmen, hounds, and fox, represented as crossing the