“1659, Feby. 27th.  Up by four o’clock.  Mr. Blayton and I took horse and straight to Saffron Walden, where at the White Hart we set up our horses and took the master to show us Audley End House, where the housekeeper showed us all the house, in which the stateliness of the ceilings, chimney-pieces, and form of the whole was exceedingly worth seeing.  He took us into the cellar, where we drank most admirable drink, a health to the King.  Here I played on my flageolette, there being an excellent echo.  He showed us excellent pictures; two especially, those of the four Evangelists and Henry VIII.  In our going my landlord carried us through a very old hospital or almshouse, where forty poor people were maintained; a very old foundation, and over the chimney-piece was an inscription in brass:  ‘Orato pro anima Thomae Bird,’ &c.  They brought me a draft of their drink in a brown bowl, tipt with silver, which I drank off, and at the bottom was a picture of the Virgin with the child in her arms done in silver.  So we took leave....”

The inscription and the “brown bowl” (which is a mazer cup) still remain, but the picturesque front of the hospital, built in the reign of Edward VI, disappeared during the awful “improvements” which took place during the “fifties.”  A drawing of it survives in the local museum.

Maldon, the capital of the Blackwater district, is to the eye of an artist a town for twilight effects.  The picturesque skyline of its long, straggling street is accentuated in the early morning or afterglow, when much undesirable detail of modern times below the tiled roofs is blurred and lost.  In broad daylight the quaintness of its suburbs towards the river reeks of the salt flavour of W.W.  Jacobs’s stories.  Formerly the town was rich with such massive timber buildings as still appear in the yard of the Blue Boar—­an ancient hostelry which was evidently modernized externally in Pickwickian times.  While exploring in the outhouses of this hostel Mr. Roe lighted on a venerable posting-coach of early nineteenth-century origin among some other decaying vehicles, a curiosity even more rare nowadays than the Gothic king-posts to be seen in the picturesque half-timbered billiard-room.

[Illustration:  Maldon, Essex.  Sky-line of the High Street at twilight]

The country around Maldon is dotted plentifully with evidences of past ages; Layer Marney, with its famous towers; D’Arcy Hall, noted for containing some of the finest linen panelling in England; Beeleigh Abbey, and other old-world buildings.  The sea-serpent may still be seen at Heybridge, on the Norman church-door, one of the best of its kind, and exhibiting almost all its original ironwork, including the chimerical decorative clamp.

[Illustration:  St. Mary’s Church, Maldon]