Once, I think, the roads crossed in the midst of a tract of common which perhaps ended where now the inn is. But as things are it might well seem to have been hidden there out of someone’s perversity. ‘I should like to wring the old [thing’s] girl’s neck for coming away here.’ So said the [girl] woman who [served me] fetched my beer when I found myself at the inn first. She was a daughter of the house, fresh from a long absence in service in London, a bright [active] wildish slattern with a cockney accent and her hair half down. She spoke angrily. If she did not get away before long, she said, she would go mad with the loneliness. She looked out sharply: [there was nothing for her to see but] all she could see was the beeches and the tiny pond beneath them and the calves standing in it drinking, alternately grazing the water here and there and thinking, and at last going out and standing still on the bank thinking. Who the ‘old girl’ was, whether she had built the house here, or what, I did not inquire. It was just the loneliness of the high placed little inn isolated under those tall beeches that pleased me. Every year I used to go there once or twice, never so often as to overcome the original feeling it had given me. I was always on the verge of turning that feeling or having it turned by a natural process, into a story. Whoever the characters would have been I do not think they would have included either the ‘old girl’ or the landlord’s [mysterious] indignant cockney daughter. The story that was to [explain] interpret the look that the house had as you came up to it under the trees never took shape. The daughter stayed on several years, bearing it so well that her wildish looks and cockney accent seemed to fit the scene, and I used to look forward to meeting her again. She would come in with her hair half down as at first or I would find her scrubbing the bricks or getting dinner ready in the taproom which was kitchen also. But before I had learnt anything from her she went. [I can only trust] I have to be content with what the landlord told me years afterwards, when he left his wheelbarrow standing in profile like a pig and came in to his taproom out of his farmyard for a glass and stood drinking outside the door.

Originally or as far back as he knew of, the house was a blacksmith’s, the lean-to taproom was the smithy as you can tell by the height of it, and the man was remembered and still spoken of for his skill. The landlord spoke of him yet had never seen him. The smith died and left a widow and as she could not use hammer and tongs and as no 2nd smith arrived to marry her, she turned the smithy into a [taproom] shop and had an off-licence to sell beer. Presently a man came along from the Chiltern beech country with a two-cylinder engine for sawing timber. At that day the land here carried far more woodland. The beech trunks were cut up to make chairs. The branches were burnt for charcoal, and the circular black floors of the charcoal-burners’ fires are still now and then cut into by the farmer’s plough. The man from the Chilterns came here to saw beech planks and brought with him a little boy, his nephew, who had to pick up chips to feed the fire of the engine. ‘My uncle’ said the landlord ‘fell in love, I suppose, with the widow, and married her.’ He continued to go about the country with his engine sawing timber. But the beeches overhanging the house were spared. The boy stayed on and farmed. The shop was turned into a taproom with a full licence and the widow sold ale until she died. The man grew old and gave up sawing and then he died. Now the nephew farms the land.