Excerpt from The Chestermarke Instinct Nevertheless, the bank must be attended, and, at ten minutes to nine, Neale lighted a cigarette, put on his hat, and strolled slowly across the market-place. Although he knew every single one of its cobble stones, every shop window, every landmark in it, that queer old square always fascinated him. It was a bit of old England. The ancient church and equally ancient Moot Hall spread along one side of it; the other three sides were filled with gabled and half timbered houses; the market-cross which stood in the middle of the Open space had been erected there in Henry the Seventh's time. Amidst all the change and development of the nineteenth century, Scarn ham had been left untouched: even the bank itself was a timeworn building, and the manager's house which flanked it was still older. Underneath all these ancient structures were queer nooks and corners. Se cret passages and stairs, hiding-places, cellarings go ing far beneath the gardens at the backs of the houses Neale, as a boy, had made many an exploration in them, especially beneath the bank-house, which was a veritable treasury of concealed stairways and cun ningly contrived doors in the black oak of the pan ellings. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.