Aubrey contributed this under the pen name of Autolycus Junior. He was meditating a further contribution—‘Little Known Folk Lore’—in which the vital spark was to be the distich:

If Mopselling Maidens go under a roof

Bread will rise to a guinea a loaf,

which an octogenarian milkmaid recalled learning at her grandmother’s knee, when an arrow from another hand twanged into the correspondence column of the Cornubian:161

Sir,

Opie Cottage, that pretty little specimen of Georgian Domestick, is not the only relic of old Tittingham to have been swept away. A far more savage piece of vandalism occurred when the fine old timbered houses in Anchor Yard were demolished. These houses had long been famous. Benjamin Crispin, in The Woolepack Open’d (1579), refers to them as ‘mansiones, nay, pleasant Palaces, newely aedify’d to match the towring ambicion of our Occidental Clothiers.’ Their destruction was the more criminal, since they had retained many of their Elizabethan features.

Dulcibella Tregurtha, B.Litt.

If the editor of the Cornubian had not used his discretion and deleted the last sentence, which ran, ‘They have since been miserably replaced by a pest-house and a wash-house,’ Aubrey might have thought twice about the note, c/o the Editor, in which he said that if Miss Tregurtha should find herself in London, he would be very happy if she would lunch with him, a fellow-antiquarian, at his club. Aubrey’s club was the Athenaeum, A female B.Litt., he supposed, would enter its portals—even those morganatic portals which admitted female guests—with a pleasing trepidation. He saw her in his mind’s eye, dowdy but not disgracing, probably thinnish, and almost certainly bespectacled; above all, virginal. Only an irreparable virgin could have been on visiting terms 162with Anchor Yard and seen no more than Elizabethan features. Her letter of acceptance was typed, but typed on a sheet of handmade paper. Her scholarship seemed reliable—after visiting his publisher he had gone on to the British Museum and checked the quotation from The Woolepack Open’d. He looked forward to a harmless, kindly luncheon, which would present him with no difficulties beyond remembering not to reveal himself as Devonian or as Autolycus Junior. It had been his experience that women, proverbially at the mercy of their passions, are in fact much more likely to be run off with by their principles; and a Miss Tregurtha who had taken pains to be a B.Litt. might not readily understand that in order to get printed in a provincial newspaper one must write like a hog.

He had appointed one o’clock for the meeting. By one-forty-five, still endeavouring to feel like a gentleman and not like a thwarted hyena, he supposed that Miss Tregurtha was not good at finding her way about London. Ten minutes later, when with tolerable resignation he was picturing Miss Tregurtha as a mangled street casualty, his attention was caught by a lady who had just come in, a lady who would be able to find her way about any capital city. Quite an amphisbaena, he was thinking mildly, when she advanced on him—her dark eyes rolling, her diamond ear-bobs swinging, six feet high at least, perfumed like Araby—and claimed him as her own. She made no reference to having kept him waiting. Instead, she told him he had saved her reason. She had been in despair, she said. She had thought that no one but she cared a snap of the fingers for the 163spoliation of the West of England. But now there were two of them: herself and Mr Cutbush.