The builders have at length adventured beyond the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose.

As Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled.

And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains.

I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed.

People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never dry.