Our favourite walk on Saturday afternoons was to the pleasant village of Kedleston, some five miles from Derby, and to its fine old inn, which to us was not simply the Kedleston Inn and nothing more but Dickens’ Maypole and nothing less.  We revelled in its resemblance, or its fancied resemblance to the famous old hostelry kept by old John Willet.  Something in the building itself, though I cannot say that, like the Maypole, it had “more gable ends than a lazy man would like to count on a sunny day,” and something in its situation, and something in the cronies who gathered in its comfortable bar, and something in the bar itself combined to form the pleasant illusion in which we indulged.  The bar, like the Maypole bar, was snug and cosy and complete.  Its rustic visitors were not so solemn and slow of speech as old John Willet and Mr. Cobb and long Phil Parkes and Solomon Daisy, “who would pass two mortal hours and a half without any of them speaking a single word, and who were firmly convinced that they were very jovial companions;” but they were as reticent and stolid and good natured as such simple country gaffers are wont to be.

I remember in particular one Saturday afternoon in late October.  It was almost the last walk I had with Tom in Derby.  The day was perfect; as clear and bright, as mellow and crisp, as rich in colour, as only an October day in England can be.  We reached the Maypole between five and six o’clock.  No young Joe Willet or gipsy Hugh was there to welcome us, but we were soon by our two selves in a homely little room, beside a cheerful fire, at a table spread with tea and ham and eggs and buttered toast and cakes—­our weekly treat.

When this delightful meal was over, a stroll as far as the church and the stately Hall of the Curzons, back to the inn, an hour or so in the snug bar with the village worthies, who welcomed our almost weekly visits and the yarns we brought from Derby town; then back home by the broad highway, under the star-lit sky—­an afternoon and an evening to be ever remembered.

The Kedleston Inn, I am told, no longer exists; no longer greets the eye of the wayfarer, no longer welcomes him to its pleasant bar.  Now it is a farmhouse.  No youthful enthusiast can now be beguiled into calling it The Maypole; and, indeed, in these unromantic days, though it had remained unchanged, there would be little danger of this I think.

Soon after this memorable day Tom left the service of the Midland for a more lucrative situation with a mercantile firm in Glasgow, and I was left widowed and alone.  For six months or more we had been living together in the country, some four miles from Derby, in the house of the village blacksmith.  It was a pretty house, stood a little apart from the forge, and was called Rock Villa.  I wonder if the present Engineer-in-Chief of the Midland Railway recollects a little incident connected with it.