Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ...to which it does, on further acquaintance, by no means play up. For Tetsworth is the very picture of decay, and has been going down the hill ever since 1840, when the coaches were taken off the road. To the old road-traffic it owed all its prosperity, and when that was taken away, it naturally began this gradual return to the obscurity whence it had arisen in the long ago. "Gradual" return, because, even though the traffic was suddenly cut off, like the instantaneous turning out of a light, those who lived here in those times could not quite realise the inevitable ruin of everything in the place, and lived on in it while it was in any way possible so to do. Only as the children grew up and could not find here the opportunities they sought did Tetsworth begin visibly to shrink. And then the old folks died and the cottages began to lack tenants, and the mischievous children who remained broke the windows, which nobody ever repaired. And here are the heaps of ruins into which those roof-trees gradually resolved, with magnificent crops of nettles giowing on the cold hearth-stones. Such is Tetsworth. It is rather a cynical circumstance that large modern schools have been built for the fewer children, and that a great new pretentious church has arisen on the site of the old one, which was never quite filled, for the rapidly decreasing population. The chief feature in Tetsworth is undoubtedly its fine old coaching inn, the "Swan." You need not be an amateur of roads and coaching history to be struck with the nobility of this old house: it is patent to all. There it stands, facing the road: its main portion thrown back, the two wings advanced, to make a kind of courtyard for the thronged traffic resorting to it in the old...
