The inn referred to, the King’s Head, was the prototype of the Maypole in “Barnaby Rudge,” and here we were delighted to stop for our belated luncheon.  The inn fronts directly on the street and, like all English hostelries, its main rooms are given over to the bar, which at this time was crowded with Sunday loafers, the atmosphere reeking with tobacco smoke and the odor of liquors.  The garden at the rear was bright with a profusion of spring flowers and sheltered with ornamental trees and vines.  The garden side of the old house was covered with a mantle of ivy, and, altogether, the surroundings were such as to make ample amends for the rather unprepossessing conditions within.  One will not fully appreciate Chigwell and its inn unless he has read Dickens’ story.  You may still see the panelled room upstairs where Mr. Chester met Geoffry Haredale.  This room has a splendid mantel-piece, great carved open beams and beautiful leaded windows.  The bar-room, no doubt, is still much the same as on the stormy night which Dickens chose for the opening of his story.  Just across the road from the inn is the church which also figures in the tale, and a dark avenue of ancient yew trees leads from the gateway to the door.  One can easily imagine the situation which Dickens describes when the old sexton crossed the street and rang the church bells on the night of the murder at Haredale Hall.

Aside from Dickens’ connection with Chigwell, the village has a place of peculiar interest to Americans in the old grammar school where William Penn received his early education.  The building still stands, with but little alteration, much as it was in the day when the great Quaker sat at the rude desks and conned the lessons of the old-time English schoolboy.

When we invited friends whom we met in London to accompany us on a Sunday afternoon trip, we could think of no road more likely to please them than the one I have just been trying to describe.  We reversed our journey this time, going out of London on the way to Chigwell.  Returning, we left the Epping road shortly after passing through that town, and followed a narrow, forest-bordered byway with a few steep hills until we came to Waltham Abbey, a small Essex market town with an important history.  The stately abbey church, a portion of which is still standing and now used for services, was founded by the Saxon king, Harold, in 1060.  Six years later he was defeated and slain at Hastings by William the Conqueror, and tradition has it that his mother buried his body a short distance to the east of Waltham Church.  The abbey gate still stands as a massive archway at one end of the river bridge.  Near the town is one of the many crosses erected by Edward I in memory of his wife, Eleanor of Castile, wherever her body rested on the way from Lincoln to Westminster.  A little to the left of this cross, now a gateway to Theobald Park, stands Temple Bar, stone for stone intact as it was in the days when traitors’ heads were raised above it in Fleet Street, although the original wooden gates are missing.  Waltham Abbey is situated on the River Lea, near the point where King Alfred defeated the Danes in one of his battles.  They had penetrated far up the river when King Alfred diverted the waters from beneath their vessels and left them stranded in a wilderness of marsh and forest.