Born—­May 11, 1788. 
  Married—­May 11, 1812. 
  Died—­May 11, 1858.

So the eleventh day of May was a lucky or an unlucky day for Mr. Potter—­probably both; but one strange feature which we only thought of afterwards was that he had lived exactly the allotted span of three score years and ten.  In the old part of the yard were the following epitaphs: 

  The Earth’s a City
  Full of crooked streets
  Death is ye market-place
  Where all must meet
  If life was merchandise
  That man could buy
  The rich would always live
  Ye poor must die.

In bygone times it was no unusual thing to find dead bodies on the road, or oftener a short distance from it, where the owners had laid themselves down to die; we ourselves remembered, in a lonely place, only a field’s breadth from the coach road to London, a pit at the side of which years ago the corpse of a soldier had been found in the bushes.  Here, apparently, there had been a similar case, with the exception that the man had been found by the side of the Watling Street instead of the fields adjoining.  No one in the district knew who the stranger was, but as sufficient money had been found on him to pay the cost of the burial, his corpse was placed in Mancetter Churchyard, and as his name was unknown, some mysterious initials, of which no one now living knew the meaning, appeared on the headstone.

Here lieth interr’d the Body of
I.

H. I. M.

What Ere we was or am
it matters not
to whom related,
or by whom begot,
We was, but am not. 
Ask no more of me
’Tis all we are
And all that you must be.

We now hurried on, but as every finger-post had been painted white to receive the new letters, the old words beneath the paint were quite illegible, and, the road being lonely, of course we got lost, so, instead of arriving at Nuneaton, we found ourselves again at the Watling Street, at a higher point than that where we had left it when leaving Atherstone.  Nearly opposite the lane end from which we now emerged there was a public-house, set back from the road, where a sign, suspended from a pole, swung alongside the Watling Street to attract the attention of travellers to the inn, and here we called to inquire our way to Nuneaton.  The name of the house was the “Royal Red Gate Inn,” the pole we had seen on the Watling Street holding a wooden gate painted red.  We asked why the red gate was a royal one, and the landlady said it was because Queen Adelaide once called there, but who Queen Adelaide was, and when she called there, she did not know.  When asked what she called for, she replied, “I don’t know, unless it was for a drink!” As we did not know who Queen Adelaide was ourselves, we had to wait until we reached Nuneaton, where we were informed that she was the wife of William IV, and that in her retirement she lived at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire, so this would be on her coach road to and from London.  The lane at one end of the Red Gate went to Fenney Drayton, where George Fox the Quaker was born, about whom we had heard farther north; but we had to push on, and finally did reach Nuneaton for the night.