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The “Wake Arms” inn stands where the roads by High Beech Green and Loughton join again. In the old days it was a posting-house of some celebrity, and a prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and badger-drawing resort of a considerable notoriety. Near it, on the right side of the road towards Epping, are those prehistoric earthworks, largely overgrown with ancient trees, called Ambresbury Banks, and supposed to take their names from Ambrosius Aurelius, a half-legendary Romanised British chieftain who died about A.D. 500. This, too, is one of the very many sites found for Boadicea’s last battle.

Epping village, or townlet, is a particularly long one, heralded by a gigantic water-tower, of distinctly unlovely design, and neighboured by a modern church, built to render religious exercises easier than when the only place of worship was the old parish church, two miles away.

The most striking note of Epping, apart from the generous width of its street, is the extraordinary number of inns and places for all kinds of refreshment. Of these the “Thatched House” is the most notable, but is now no more thatched than is the “Thatched House Club” in London. There is a baulking air of picturesqueness in the long view down Epping street, but, taken in detail and analysed, it is evasive, and certainly most elusive when sought to be transferred to paper.

AMBRESBURY BANKS.

At Thornwood Common, some two miles onward, we encounter the uttermost notice-board of the City Corporation, and bid good-bye to the Forest. Thence, crossing a high ridge of quiet country, we come steeply down hill, past the “Sun and Whalebone” inn, and across picturesque Potter Street Common, with its avenues and modern church, to the single-streeted hamlet of Potter Street. This again gives place to the village of Harlow, with a sprinkling of plastered and gabled houses and an exceedingly ugly Union Workhouse. Harlow is a village with a preposterously urban air, and as much “side” as that of a hobbledehoy who fancies himself a grown man. The reason of this attitude is found, perhaps, in Harlow possessing, not only a railway station, but a busy wharf as well, on the Stort Navigation. That wharf is nearly a mile away down the road, and all that distance the highway is punctuated with the coal-droppings from the carts that ply between that waterway and the village.

“SAPSWORTH.”

Beyond the wharf comes Sawbridgeworth, also owing its sustained prosperity to the canalised Stort, and still not only a busy townlet, but also a very old-fashioned one. It is still essentially a town of malt, and the old wooden and cowled malt-houses remain to this day its chief characteristic.

Until quite recently known to its natives as “Sapsworth,” Sawbridgeworth has at last lost that archaic distinction. Now that every country lad is taught to spell and read, and the yokel has the evidence of the finger-posts, among other things, to tell him that it is “Sawbridgeworth,” it is of no use to tell him that his father and mother called it otherwise. “I kin read, cawnt I?” he asks, citing the finger-post as a witness. It is quite certain that the stranger who should nowadays ask for Sapsworth would be as little understood as were the travellers of old who enquired for Sawbridgeworth.

At Harlow wharf the road left Essex and entered Hertfordshire, and so runs through Sawbridgeworth and the hamlets of Spelbrook and Thorley Street to Bishop’s Stortford. Just short of that town there is a choice of ways. By bearing to the left, Bishop’s Stortford is entered direct; by keeping to the right, along what was once known as “Queen Anne’s new road,” the coaches bound for places beyond avoided Bishop’s Stortford altogether, and set down passengers for it at the suburb of Hockerill.

Hockerill is on the hill, Bishop’s Stortford is in the hole, and, as its name would imply, beside the river Stort, dividing the two counties of Essex and Herts.

We will take the left-hand, and older, road, for the excellent reason that along it, on the uttermost outskirts of the town, there stands a house even already historic, and in years to come destined to be something of a shrine. No saint, indeed, was born beneath its roof, but a man whose memory is much more worshipful than that of the majority in the hierarchy of the Blessed. If you love your country, you cannot choose but be interested in this house, and cannot do aught but reverence that man who was born here: the man who saved Central Africa for the Empire. We are all Imperialists now, and patriotism is cheap to-day, but it was a frame of mind entertained by few when Rhodes first became an expansionist. Those were the days when Gladstone was the wet-nurse of sucking alien ambitions, the friend of every country but his own, and ready to surrender anything and everything in the sacred cause of foreign nationalities. If Rhodes was an expansionist, may we not with justice apply the term “contractionist” to the great demagogue, that great master of phrases that sounded so full of meaning and were really so empty, whose life was equally divided by the making of speeches and the explaining of them away?

In this house, then—a very commonplace semi-detached stuccoed house—Cecil John Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia, son of the Rev. F. W. Rhodes, vicar of Stortford, was born, July 5th, 1853.

BIRTHPLACE OF CECIL RHODES.

No sketch is needed here of a career whose record is writ in the politics of his time, and indelibly scored in the history of his country. Like Moses, it was not given him actually to enter that Promised Land of Empire he had seen afar, but when he died, in 1902, the fruition of the idea was at least assured. He looked, like some Prophet, upon South and Central Africa, and with the phrase, “English, all English, that’s my dream!” made a comprehensive span upon the map. A very pleasant dream too. Conceive what a nightmare the world would be if predominance were given the brutal German, the frenzied Frenchman, or the thinly veneered Russian savage! We are the salt of the earth, and let us savour it as strongly as we can. Thinking thus, it behoves us to honour this great Empire-builder in the bulk, even though we may criticise him in detail.