Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one.

That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever been hanged on it.

Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that Inkpen is.
That was one of three strange events in the life of the village which I heard: the other two must be passed by; they would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them justice.

To me the best thing in or of the village was the vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe a nature, so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came down like a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely gave up his time to me for the rest of that day.

To count his years he was old: he had been vicar of Coombe for half a century, but he was a young man still and had never had a day's illness in his life--he did not know what a headache was.