Bagshot has had dealings with Stuart and other princes hunting the deer and putting up at the inns. Both the Charleses used to hunt in Bagshot Park. Once there was a pretty princes' quarrel. It was at one of the Bagshot inns that the Duke of Buckingham, at the height of his wild career, had the coolness to turn Prince Rupert's horses out of the stables and put in his own. Rupert complained to the King, and the Duke of York backed him; but Charles decided for Buckingham. Twenty years or so later, John Evelyn was at a Bagshot inn with Pepys, and went to call on a Mrs. Graham at her house in Bagshot Park. It was "very commodious and well-furnished, as she was an excellent housewife, a prudent and virtuous lady." She begged him to stay to dinner and sleep the night; she told him all about her children—how the eldest was ill with the small-pox but going on pretty well, and the others running about among infected people so as to catch the disease and get it over while they were young. Evelyn quite approved; he had had small-pox in his own family, and knew something about it.

The house in Bagshot Park was made even more commodious some forty years ago, as a residence for the Duke of Connaught.

In the Ordnance Maps, Bagshot Heath is placed south of Bagshot; in the old maps of the county, the Heath lies to the north and north-east, and would merge into what is now Chobham Common. It must have covered many more miles than the maps allow it to-day. Chobham Ridges stretch from its south-west corner, a long, sandy scar of three miles, overlooking the Bisley rifle ranges and the desert ground behind them. You are sure to be invited to admire Chobham Ridges, and no doubt twenty years ago it was fine wild country. But frequent notice-boards observing that when the red flag is flying it is dangerous to walk any further, barbed wire, excavations of gravel, and sand trampled by cavalry horses into a paste like wet coaldust may temper the warmest enthusiasm. A hideous foreground can do something to spoil even a fine view, and the view from the Ridges is certainly wide and wild. The finest view I have had from Chobham Ridges was a thunderstorm driving down over Brookwood. It was a gusty, rainy day, and the rolling white and grey clouds and the lines of driven hail rode down the sky like a charge.

I once met, on Chobham Ridges, a pleasantly contented family. In front of a sort of bivouac of bent poles covered with cloths sat an old, weatherbeaten man, tailor-fashion, making a straw beehive. Another beehive, finished, with a straw handle, lay at his side. A wood fire smoked and sputtered a yard or two away; on a flat wooden barrow near were rough cooking utensils and a dark tabby cat; two small boys, one of them with not much more on him than a large pair of trousers, brought wood and bracken for the fire. It was raining, but I was wished good afternoon with the utmost cheerfulness. Were those his boys? They were; they generally went with him. Was there a good sale for beehives round there? There was a pretty good sale; this one, with a handle, he should try to sell for two shillings; he might have to take less; a farmer let him have the straw. Yes, he was known about there. That was the boys' cat; it generally went with them. What was that noise in the tent? That was a pair of kittens; yes, the boys liked to have them; they generally had kittens. One of them picked up the cat, upside down, with obvious affection.

Chobham itself lies five or six miles away from Chobham Ridges, south by a mile even from Chobham Common. Long before you come into the village you catch sight of the church spire, with its lead covering washed by the rain to a brilliant whiteness. Rising above the red tiles of the village into a blue sky it looks as if it had been painted yesterday. The church has been largely rebuilt, but has some fine Norman pillars, and contains besides the tomb of the great Nicholas Heath, once Archbishop of York. He was Lord Chancellor of England under Queen Mary, and a sound Papist. When Elizabeth came to the throne he resigned, but remained "so much in the Queen's Bon-graces," as an old writer puts it, "that she visited him once a Year through his Life, believing his mistaken Piety sincere."

Two miles behind the Ridges is Frimley, with an old inn and a church to which Americans come often. Bret Harte lived his last years at a house on the hillside near, and is buried in the churchyard. But the Bret Harte of The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Heathen Chinee does not, of course, belong to Frimley; those were earlier successes which he never equalled later.

The village politician ought to flourish at Frimley. On a board near the church I found a warning against a crime which must be becoming rarer. "Notice is hereby given that any person or persons found damaging the parish pump will be prosecuted," it ran, but the pump I did not find.

In Aubrey's day, Frimley had the gentlest of hermits. He fled from the changes and chances of the Parliamentary wars, and led the simplest possible life in the wilds. Aubrey describes his cottage:

"At the end of this Hundred, I must not forget my noble friend, Mr. Charles Howard's Cottage of Retirement (which he called his Castle), which lay in the middle of a vast Heathy Country, far from any Road or Village in the Hope of a healthy Mountain, where, in the troublesome Times, he withdrew from the wicked World, and enjoyed himself here, where he had only one Floor, his little Dining Room, a Kitchen, a Chapel, and a Laboratory. His utensils were all of Wood or Earth; near him were about half a Dozen Cottages more, on whom he shew'd much compassion and Charity."

Frimley is a convenient stopping-place at which to join the railway. A walk for another two miles or so would bring the curious in the history of the prize ring, if any still remain, to a classic spot on the Hampshire border. It was in a meadow half a mile from Farnborough station, selected because it would be easy to step out of one county into the next and so avoid the police, that Tom Sayers fought the huge American-Irishman Heenan, in almost the last great prize-fight fought in England. The fight came off on April 17, 1860; the most extraordinary care had been taken to keep the secret of the place of meeting, and the accounts of the proceedings, when one remembers that it all took place in the mid-Victorian quiet which was producing the Idylls of the King and Adam Bede are nearly unbelievable. Two monster trains carried twelve hundred spectators, peers, members of Parliament, magistrates, officers, clergymen, and gentlemen from London Bridge at dawn. Three pounds each was the price of the tickets. Nobody except two or three in the secret knew till that morning where the fight would be; the police, mounted and on foot, lined the railway from London Bridge for sixteen miles, all armed with cutlasses. The trains "turned off," as the account in Bell's Life in London puts it, at Reigate, took water near Guildford, and ran into Farnborough station "after a most pleasant journey through one of the prettiest countries in England, which, illumined by a glorious sun, and shooting forth in vernal beauty, must have inspired all with intense gratification." Thus Bell's eloquent reporter. Thirty-seven rounds were fought, in most of which Sayers was knocked down; his right arm was bruised and useless; Heenan could only see out of one eye. They were stopped at last, and in a few minutes Heenan was blind. Bell's Life next morning came out with a special eight-page edition, the two centre pages twelve columns of tiny print—nearly 30,000 words—describing every detail of the fight, the men, and the history of boxing in general. There were some protests by sentimental people against the brutality of the thing, and Bell, professing a vigorous belief in this particular form of "muscular Christianity," remarks reflectively that "the whole country is not yet converted to the right way on the subject of pugilism."

Bisley, which lies on the other side of Chobham Ridges, opposite to Frimley, is, as I have said, best reached by rail; indeed, there is little inducement to any one to reach it in any other way. Twenty years ago Bisley was a tiny village. It is now a vast rifle range. The name has become shifted from the little group of cottages and the quaint church standing among the cornfields half a mile away to the huge common enclosed by the National Rifle Association, where every year in July the great shooting prizes are won and lost. Bisley is in many ways unique. It carries on the traditions of Wimbledon, which were greater than any other rifle meeting. It can show more targets and better ranges than any other range; it attracts rifle-shots from every British possession on the face of the globe, and for a week the rain of bullets sent into the sandy banks behind the targets is almost ceaseless. Perhaps the most remarkable sight of the "Bisley week" is the second stage of the shooting for the King's Prize, when three hundred competitors are "down" at the same time opposite a hundred targets in a row, and when the shooting is not over until 6,300 separate shots have been fired, signalled, and chalked on the blackboards by the range-markers. But the great occasion is, of course, the final stage; when the winner is chaired and cheered, and asked the usual ridiculous questions about smoking and drinking. Through all the week of the meeting the camp is a gay sight, with its white tents and flaring bunting, and the pennons blowing all down the long ranges to measure the wind for prone riflemen. "Lying prone on the back," by the way, is a phrase which creeps into many newspapers during Bisley week. It would clearly not do to speak of a "supine" rifle-shot.

One would think that the noise of a rifle-range would make the neighbourhood intolerable. But even with the wind blowing to you from the range, a few hundred yards almost silences the sound of the range. I have walked on the common between Bisley itself and the range, when firing for the King's Prize was in full progress, and was merely conscious of an echo chattering uneasily in the trees.

There have been plenty of ways of spelling Bisley. Busele, Buselagh, Bushley, Busheley, Busley, Bussley, Busly, and Bisleigh are a few of them; there are probably variations. The church has a fine old wooden porch, with an old yew opposite it; but the door is locked, and visitors are not allowed to look over the church unaccompanied. My guide was courteous and obliging; but why should any one be given all this trouble? There is a famous well near, named after St. John the Baptist, the water of which was once used for all the christenings. It is not very easily found, and the local harvesters could tell me nothing about it; but I discovered it near a farmhouse a few hundred yards south-west of the churchyard. Aubrey says that the dedication of the well made him curious to try it with oak-galls, which turned the water purple. Why should the name have impelled him to this particular curiosity? Aubrey was always testing wells with oak-galls, presumably for iron. Like many other famous wells, the water of this spring has always been said to be "colder in summer and warmer in winter" than any other spring in the neighbourhood.

Some of the names in this part of Surrey are curious. Cuckoo Hill, on the borders of Bagshot Heath, is pretty enough, and so is Gracious Pond, north-west of Chobham, though the Pond, which was once "great" and "stocked with excellent carp," is probably much smaller than it was. Brock Hill, near Cuckoo Hill, is of course the hill of badgers, and Penny Pot ought to be, if it is not, a memory of good ale. But Donkeytown! Who would live at Donkeytown? It is, however, quite a flourishing little community, though probably it will be eventually embraced by its larger neighbour, West End, which is the nearest village to Bisley to the north, and the largest. Looking at the map, it is a little difficult to understand why the cheaper forms of village building should spread in this part of the county, which, so to speak, leads nowhere: but possibly the presence of the Gordon Boys' Home has created fresh needs which must be supplied locally. The large buildings, which cost some L24,000, were set up here in 1885, and are a home for 200 boys.

Between Bisley and Chobham runs a road with rather an odd feature. For a short distance near Chobham village the little Hale Bourne, into which the Windle Brook has here grown, runs beside it, dark and full, but almost invisible under its overarching alders and dog-roses. Just as it leaves the roadside it is joined by a strange companion. Another little stream, coming down from the north, runs into the Hale Bourne after travelling the last hundred yards of its course over the whole breadth of a road. The road, which is of gravel, and regularly used, is hard and level, and the stream turns it into a bed, perhaps eight or nine feet across. The natural course would seem to be to dig the stream a bed of its own by the side of the road; but local ingenuity has preferred to send the traveller dryshod over a stile through the field at the side of the stream, which duly proceeds in the Ordnance map down the road it has chosen.



CHAPTER XX

THE WEY VILLAGES

Old Woking.—Behind the Veil.—A Royal Palace.—Necropolis.—When not to dig a grave.—"Lumpy" Stevens.—The Ripley Road.—The Anchor and the Talbot Dog.—An Open Box.—Teal by Twilight.—Ockham.—Seven Streams.—Newark.—Jackdaws two shillings the Dozen.—The Wisley Garden.—Byfleet.—A Ghost in Velvet.

In whatever way you may choose to travel through Surrey, it is difficult to avoid making Woking a centre and a rendezvous. All the trains stop there; at least, I cannot remember ever passing through the station without stopping, either to change trains, which generally takes three quarters of an hour, or to wait in the station until it is time to go on again, which usually takes eleven minutes. I never found anything else to do at Woking, unless it were at night, when the railway lights up wonderful vistas and avenues of coloured lamps. Then the platform can be tolerable. Once when I had a long time to wait I walked out to the church which stands rather finely on the ridge north of the railway. I thought then it was Woking church: it belongs to Horsell. It was that Woking, the Woking of the station, which for many years I imagined to be the only Woking in Surrey. One did not wish for another.

But there is another Woking, and it is as pretty and quiet as the railway Woking is noisy and tiresome. It stands with its old church on the banks of the Wey two miles away, a huddle of tiled roofs and old shops and poky little corners, as out-of-the-way and sleepy and ill-served by rail as anyone could wish. I found it first on a day in October, and walked out from the grinding machinery of the station by a field-path running through broad acres of purple-brown loam, over which plough-horses tramped and turned. It was a strange and arresting sight, for over the dark rich mould there was drawn a veil of shimmering grey light wider and less earthly than any mist or dew. The whole plough land was alive with gossamer; and Old Woking lay beyond the gossamer as if that magic veil were meant to shield it from the engines and the smoke.

Old Woking, indeed, lies in country deep enough to forget the railway altogether, and to take to the water as the highway. The Wey wanders in and out by the village, and half-a-mile away at Send the Navigation canal joins the Wey proper, as the little river has come to be called to distinguish it from the canal. The canal cuts businesslike corners and straight lines when the Wey, having plenty of time to spare, wants to wander an extra two or three miles about a field. From Send to Weybridge or to Guildford, down stream or up, by the canal towing-path or by boat, is a delightful journey in spring or summer. As good a round as can be taken walking is from Woking through Send by Newark Priory, Pyrford and Wisley to Byfleet, where the railway can be joined or the journey continued to Weybridge or back to Woking. But there are, of course, twenty ways of seeing the little villages that cluster round the Wey so closely in this corner of Surrey, either on foot or by boat, or rowing and walking both.

But Woking has not always been quiet and old-fashioned and sleepy. Once it was a royal manor, and contained a royal residence. William the Conqueror held Woking in demesne himself, and it passed through the hands of every king until James I, who gave it to one of his foresters, Sir Edward Zouch. Sir Edward had to pay something for his privilege. He held the manor on condition that he was to bring to the king's table, on the Feast of St. James each year, the first dish at dinner, and with the dish the satisfactorily large rent of a hundred pounds in coined gold of the realm. Perhaps he still made something out of his tenants; at all events, a further token of gratitude, he was to wind a call in Woking Forest on Coronation Day. He may have liked the rental, but he could not have liked the old palace, for he knocked down every brick of it. The strangest and most melancholy fate seems to wait on every palace in Surrey built or lived in by an English king,—even by the friend of a king. Of Oatlands, Guildford, Woking, Nonsuch, Sheen, each a king's palace, scarcely a stone remains; Wolsey's palace by the Mole is nothing but a gateway; the Archbishops' palace at Croydon has sunk as low as a wash-house. Kingston owns the stone on which English kings have been crowned; but elsewhere in Surrey the royal hand has touched only to destroy.

A persistent association hangs to the name of the town by the station, undeserved but traditional. Woking, like the Duke of Plaza-toro, "likes an interment." Much of the land near the town is owned by a company which, while it builds villas for the living, especially those who find advantages in a fast train service, has named itself Necropolis, which is grim enough for anybody living or dead. But the Necropolis Company, whether it knows it or not, did not found the tradition. That stands to the record of an old grave-digger interviewed by Aubrey. He conversed grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small button at the top, not much unlike the top of an asparagus; of these he sometimes finds two or three in a grave." He was "sure it was not a fern-root" and had with diligence traced to its root; and since he had satisfied himself of its grisly origin, he knew better than to dig a grave near where the root grew.



On the maps Send looks like a single tiny village, south of Woking by half a mile. It is in reality a large parish, and since the name is corrupted simply from Sand, it is natural enough to find it dotted all round the neighbourhood with other names tacked on to it—Sendholme, Sendgrove, Sendhurst, Send Heath, and Sendmarsh. The names are scattered only less widely than the parish itself. The church stands a mile from the little hamlet of Send, on the banks of the Wey, like the churches of Pyrford and Woking, and the ruins of the great Priory of Newark, to which Send Church and her chapel at Ripley both belonged. The three villages with their churches are still, perhaps, not much larger than they were two or three hundred years ago; the Priory is shattered; only the village with the chapel has grown.

By Send churchyard stands the bole of a mighty elm, riven and iron-bound. I like to imagine that it may have been climbed by one of the great Surrey cricketers of the old days of the Hambledon Club. Edward Stevens, the famous "Lumpy," was born at Send, and spent his boyhood there till he went to Chertsey and became, as John Nyren describes him, one of the two greatest bowlers he ever saw. "Lumpy" got his queer name either because he was, in Nyren's words, "a short man, round-shouldered and stout" or, according to another tradition, because at one of the dinners of the Hambledon Club he ate an apple-pie whole. Surely he must have been "Lumpy" before, besides after, that achievement. Yet another story has it that he was given his name because of some trick in his bowling. Certainly his methods were not what we should call exactly orthodox to-day. It was the privilege of visiting elevens in his day to choose the pitch on which the match should be played, and that was "Lumpy's" opportunity. Nyren explains his plan:—

"He would invariably choose the ground where his balls would shoot, instead of selecting a rising spot to bowl against, which would materially have increased the difficulty to the hitter, seeing that so many more would be caught out by the mounting of the ball. As, however, nothing delighted the old man like bowling the wicket down with a shooting ball, he would sacrifice the other chances to the glory of that achievement. Many a time have I seen our General twig this prejudice in the old man when matched against us, and chuckle at it. But I believe it was almost the only mistake he ever made, professional or even moral, for he was a most simple and amiable creature."

There is an unkind legend which speaks of "Lumpy" as a bit of a smuggler in his young days, but Nyren, at all events, never believed it, for he ends by declaring handsomely that "he had no trick about him, but was as plain as a pike-staff in all his dealings." "Lumpy," whether he smuggled or not, certainly has his niche in cricket history. It was to him that the wicket owes its third stump. In a match played in 1775 on the Portsmouth Artillery Ground, between five of the Hambledon Club and five of All England, "Lumpy" three times sent the ball between the last Hambledon man's stumps without bowling him, and after the match, which Hambledon won in consequence, the number of the stumps was increased from two to three.

Send lies deep among the fields, counting itself fortunate, perhaps, that it is not on the Ripley road, a mile away. Ripley itself, perhaps, owes its fortune, even if it owes more besides, to the road which it has named. The story belongs to all the villages of a great highway. The coaches brought their heyday, the railway spoiled it, the bicycle re-made it, and now the village is being re-decorated by the motor-car.

The Ripley road, for the two days in the week when it is most used, is a place to avoid. Yet it can be beautiful, and there is an approach to it hardly equalled near any other highway in the county. The late Mrs. Buxton, of Foxwarren Park, above Wisley Common, for years permitted the public to walk and drive through her private grounds away from the high road, and that generous lady's permission has been continued by her successor. The carriage drive runs by oaks and bracken through which pheasants rustle, past a strange, tall column of black wood—a totem-pole brought from Queen Charlotte's Islands; then it rises to the edge of a ridge overlooking a wide and level stretch of pinewood and heather. In August, when the ling is out with the bell-heather, and the pines stand deep in fern and rushes, no lovelier carpet spreads under any Surrey hill. The road runs a white thread through it—a road best viewed from afar. The weight of wheels has ground the surface to powder.

Ripley itself, but for the traffic, would be the prettiest village on the road. A long string of low-roofed houses lines the highway; little white gabled cottages offer tea and refreshment; two old inns share most, I suppose, of the custom of fasting travellers. The Anchor, an inn of many gables, has fixed itself in the affections of bicyclists since the days when they rode velocipedes, and its black-beamed walls and passages hold drawings of strange souls mounted on wheels which would have scared Ixion. The Talbot, which was once the Dog (but a talbot is a dog always), is a house of imposing squareness. You may see the dog painted above the door, a liver-and-white fox-terrier, all proper. Opposite the inns stretches Ripley green, a broad and shining level with many memories of Surrey cricket, and in particular of "Lumpy" Stevens, of Send.



The motor-car has brought prosperity, even if it is a prosperity that can soil. But the tarnish washes off in night and rain. Ripley may look its best early on a Saturday morning, before the flood rushes down the road. When the little village lies clean and fresh in the sun, and the inns are busy with white tablecloths and cooking potatoes, and the children sit on the edge of the green before the dust comes, there is a sense of orderly bustle and of waiting for a day of hard work and good money that is pleasant enough.

One building only has suffered from the business of the road. The little church stands behind arches and canopies of clipped yew, its walls almost touching the highway. It is an interesting little building, though much altered from its oldest form; the chancel has the remains of clustered pillars, and a beautiful string-course of Caen stone running round it. But those have not been the only attractions to visitors. When I was there I noticed that the oak collection-box by the door stood with its lid propped open. The caretaker happened to be in the church, and I showed it to her. "Oh yes," she said in a matter-of-fact tone, "we have to keep it like that. It has been robbed so often that we prop it open, so as to prevent people putting anything in." The church door still remains as wide open as the box. It would be a pious act for some passing motor-car—or a collection from many—to present the little church with a stronger box. Such continued hospitality, so vilely abused, deserves a return.



Two miles up the road lies the Hut Pond, opposite an inn that serves many tables. There is no quiet on the pond in the business of the day, but I was once on it on an October evening, and as the sun went down the sky filled suddenly with teal. Bunches of teal wheeled and circled in the cold twilight, whizzed down among the rushes, darted up again and round over the pines, then shot down again and settled, splashing quietly in the sedge.



Ockham village, with its church and park, is south-east of Ripley by a mile or so. The charm of Ockham church lies in its tower, its east window, and its deep and happy site among the oaks and elms of Ockham Park. The church lies some hundred yards from the road, under the windows of the manor-house, a building which cannot be said to owe anything to the taste or consistency of successive architects. The tower is thirteenth century, buttressed, mottled into cool greys and pinks, and heavy with ivy. But the chief decoration of Ockham Church is its thirteenth century, seven-lancet east window, and in the carving of the capitals of its slender columns of black Sussex marble. There is some quaint Flemish glass in one of the south windows; but the church is spoiled by an extraordinarily ugly little chapel built on the north side as a mausoleum for the family of the Kings. The first of the line of these Kings was one Peter, the son of an Exeter grocer. He came up to London, soon made his mark as a lawyer, and died Lord Chancellor. There are several of his descendants buried with him, and their coronets hang above the arch of the chapel. They add a peculiar tawdriness; but the chapel itself, with its dull blue paint, and the strange, bath-like sarcophagus below Rysbrach's statues of the first Lord King and his lady, is the main offence.



Ockham itself, even with that humming white highway not a mile distant, is untouched and unspoiled: nothing more than a half-dozen or so of half-timbered or brick cottages and farm-buildings, rain-bleached and creeper-veiled, and fronted with some of the prettiest and brightest gardens in Surrey. One of the sleepy little buildings bears the legend "County Police," forbidding in new blue enamel. What should anyone do with police in Ockham?

But Ockham, perhaps, lies a little too far from the old waterway to join the group of villages and churches which cluster along this winding stretch of Wey. Still it belongs to Ripley, if not to Ripley's group along the river. Rivers, here, would be the better word, for the Wey has hardly yet made up its mind as to its right channel north of Woking, and by Ripley runs actually in seven streams almost parallel with one another, some of them cut artificially, but others tiny remnants of the broad watercourse which once rolled through Surrey to the sea. No doubt it was this abundance of water which first attracted the founder of Newark Priory, whose ruins stand almost in the centre of the seven streams. The monks must have had plenty of choice of fishing.

Newark Priory is generally supposed to have been founded as a house of Black Canons by Ruald de Calva and his wife Beatrice de Sandes in the reign of Richard I. But Ruald de Calva as a fact only re-founded or endowed the house, which was founded long before, probably by a Bishop of Winchester. Its older name was Aldbury, and Newark—or Newsted, as it was once called—which for us is an aged ruin, was Aldbury rebuilt with a new church and a new name. It is in some ways a rather uninteresting ruin. Of the tracery of the windows, or any of the lighter and more delicate architectural work, not a stone remains. I believe much of the more easily used stone-work found its way into the building of neighbouring houses, perhaps into the paving of the roads. But it has a certain bluntness and gauntness of its own, standing solid and stark in the plain meadowland of the Wey. Perhaps if one were to "visit it by the pale moonlight" it would take on darker graces and dignities. As it is, there is somewhere about it an air of protest; it is like a ghost that cannot get back before daylight. Horses gallop about the rough field under its walls; boating parties wonder why it should be thought worth while to fence it off with wire. Once I caught an echo of the real Newark, late on a dark and stormy afternoon, when a sudden snipe rose at my feet out of one of the half-dry Priory stewponds. That wild cry must have been familiar enough to the old monks wandering by the stream in search of a likely run for perch or pike.

The "very old castle" which Frank Buckland, the naturalist, mentions in the following note, taken from his edition of White's Selborne, must surely be Newark Priory, which is now a happy (and I think unmolested) home of jackdaws:—



"At Whistley, near Weybridge, the people go in May, when the birds are about a fortnight old, to the ruins of a very old castle. Men carry long ladders, and with blunt iron hooks take out the young jackdaws, and if there are no buyers they throw them to the ground. Bird dealers take hampers down to Whistley and bring up all the birds caught, as many as ten dozen of young jackdaws. They cost on the spot 2s. per dozen. The reason why they are taken is to stop the increase of jackdaws in the neighbourhood. If the young jackdaws are taken when about a fortnight old, the old ones will not 'go to nest' again that season. If the eggs only were taken, the birds would lay again immediately."

The Canal and the Wey by Newark lie in some of the quietest and wildest country in Surrey. It is not the wildness of Thursley Common, or the quiet of the pinewoods; but it is the sunny peace of a waterway almost deserted, of unploughed, rushy meadows, of waterside paths and thickets that fill in April and May with a tide of bird life which stays here, and elsewhere passes or is hardly seen. A May morning on the Wey Canal rings with singing. You can count scores of cuckoos gliding in the sun and calling from the budding branches; woodpeckers laugh from oak to oak; plovers tumble in the wind; herons flap up lazily at a bend in the stream, and flap lazily down again; snipe cut high arcs in the blue and drum down from the sailing clouds; perhaps from the very heart of the thicket the nightingale bursts into a pulsing riot of song. Surrey varies extraordinarily widely as a shelter and a nesting ground for birds, but most of its birds, I think, know the Wey Canal.

Of the seven streams which surround Newark Abbey the northernmost runs under the little hill on which stands Pyrford Church. Pyrford itself, on its outskirts, unhappily, is beginning to hear Woking. The Woking builder's hammer is already ringing under its trees. But the heart of Pyrford hitherto remains untouched. A cluster of red-brick farm-buildings, a footpath over meadows of buttercups, a score of arching elms, and a little shingle-spired Norman church on a knoll above the stream—Pyrford is one of the smallest and sweetest of Weyside villages. Few churches have so strong an impression of an untouched past. In plan it is scarcely altered from its Norman design of the twelfth century; and it stands on its knoll overlooking the meadows away to the great Priory of which it was a chapel, the Priory in ruins, and itself with hardly a stone loosened for nearly eight centuries. The roof is later than the walls, but there is a fascination in staring up at the old oak timber. It was the same vista of retreating beams of mighty wood on which the eye of the Newark priest droning from the altar must have rested; perhaps for his sleepy congregation there was the same glimpse of ivy tendrils creeping in under the eaves, and on drowsy afternoons in May the same chatter and hiss of nesting starlings. From the scanty scraps of the paintings on the wall you can only guess vaguely at the texts of the old Sunday sermons: manna falls in the wilderness; Moses brings water out of the rock; probably the congregation listened with most eagerness to the third, the death of Jezebel.



Donne, the poet, perhaps knew the paintings well. In the days when he was still unforgiven by Sir George More of Loseley for having run away with his daughter Anne, he and his bride lived for some years as the guests of Sir John Wolley, Queen Elizabeth's secretary, at Pyrford Park. May it not have been the seven-streamed Wey by Pyrford which gave him his stanzas for The Bait, his parody of Marlowe?

Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands and crystal brooks, With silken lines and silver hooks.

Let others freeze with angling reeds, And cut their legs with shells and weeds, Or treacherously poor fish beset With strangling snare, or windowy net.

Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest; Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies, Bewitch poor fishes' wandering eyes.

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit, For thou thyself art thine own bait; That fish, that is not catch'd thereby, Alas! is wiser far than I.



Two miles further down the Canal—perhaps nearly four by the Wey itself—stands another little church, almost, like Pyrford and Woking, on the edge of the stream. Wisley church is the tiniest of the little group between Send and the Thames, but is not otherwise remarkable. The village is not much more than a farmhouse and a noble barn; perhaps Wisley is better known for its pond and its garden. The garden, unhappily, is almost a thing of the past. Experiment and officialdom have settled heavily on its sandy soil, and the wilder charm of the old pleasance has left it. A few years ago, when its late owner, Mr. Wilson of Weybridge, was alive, it was a delight to many hundreds of visitors, whom the owner generously allowed to share in his pleasure in rare and beautiful flowers. He had collected into a few acres of ground, protected by ingeniously laid out plantations, an almost incredible variety of plants, especially flowering bulbs, and in his woods and ponds, besides, had tried to establish other curious and interesting wild life. Bird-boxes fastened to the trees were to tempt tits and nuthatches; in the reeds of the ponds great bull-frogs used to squat croaking, and little green frogs climbed the leaves above them. To-day that is hardly more than a memory. When the owner died the garden was bought by Sir Thomas Hanbury and presented to the Royal Horticultural Society. The society came down from Kew upon the fold; and on the open ground beside the old garden, tangled and unhappy, set down a row of superb glasshouses, planted a number of specimen fruit trees, and devoted itself forthwith to up-to-date research and education on the most approved lines of modern scientific arboriculture and hybridisation in hothouses.



Last of the little bunch of Weyside churches is Byfleet, with a belfry built on some magnificent oak beams. Byfleet Manor House used to be a royal hunting lodge, and was given with the right of free warren by Edward II to Piers Gaveston. Its last royal owner was James the First's queen, Anne of Denmark, and it was probably she who built the massive walls and the forecourt of the garden of the present home. But the manor house itself is early Georgian; and though it has had some ugly additions, it still stands square and strong behind its fine old gateway. James is supposed to have planted the Scotch firs in the garden, to remind Queen Anne of the home she left behind her in the north.

Such a building would be sure to have some quaint traditions. It is known locally as the King's House, and there is a legend that Henry VIII was nursed there. He may have been, but not in the present building. It has no regular ghosts, but Miss Frances Mitchell, writing on the history of the Manor in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, tells us that Anne of Denmark is said to have been seen moving through the lower rooms; and there is a very dim tradition of a dwarf in purple velvet who wanders in the forecourt. A third legend, in which the rustic historian apparently confuses Anne of Denmark with the last Stuart Queen, relates that Queen Anne came to Byfleet and from a neighbouring hill watched Marlborough win the battle of Blenheim.



CHAPTER XXI

RICHMOND AND KEW

The Woking of the Surrey Thames.—Peasants in the field.—Ham House.—The Cabal.—Petersham.—Richmond Hill.—The Heart of Midlothian.—Deer in the sunlight.—Queen Elizabeth dying.—Kew Palace.—The secret of the Gardens.

Woking is the centre to which it is difficult not to return in exploring the Wey and the Wey villages: Surbiton is the centre of the roads about the Surrey Thames. Surbiton has tramways besides a railway, and Surbiton station is perhaps the most convenient starting point either for Hampton Court on the Middlesex bank, or for Kingston, or through Kingston to Ham and Richmond and Kew. Kingston, in one direction, has its own chapter; so have the Dittons and Walton in another; beyond Kingston lies a walk (not often taken, perhaps), along the river bank to Ham and Petersham; a walk that leads to Richmond Park and its deer dozing among the bracken in the afternoon sun, and Kew Gardens waiting in the evening—the best hour of all the day among those ordered flowers and trees.

I never saw Ham until one day, walking out from Kingston, I suddenly found myself in the fruitful spaces of market gardens and farms. It is the suddenest change. Kingston, with the oldest memories of all Surrey towns, is as new and noisy as a thoroughly efficient service of tramways can make it; and then, within a stone's throw of bricks and barracks, you come upon acres beyond acres of level farmland, bean-fields and cabbage-fields and all the pleasantness of tilled soil and trenched earth and the wealth of kindly fruits. When I saw the fields by Ham on a hot day in August there were country women gathering runner beans into coarse aprons, stooping over the clustered plants, the humblest and hardiest of workers of the farm. Under that hot sun, in the wide spaces of those unfenced fields, with no English hedge to shut off neighbouring crops and tillage, the air of those bent, lowly figures was of French peasantry, French nearness to the difficult livelihood of the soil. They might have gleaned for Millet; they should cease their work at the Angelus.



Teddington Lock, a mile down stream from Kingston suburbs, joins Surrey to Middlesex and the tide to the tideless river with a vast piece of engineering. Further down, Eel Pie island breaks the stream, a bunch of chairs, tables and trees, where, for all I know, others may still eat and praise eel pie. But the fascination of this stretch of river is on the Surrey bank, where Ham House stands among noble trees. Ham House is not a "show house"; and indeed, considering its nearness to Richmond and London, it would be impossible that it should be. There are limits to the claims which may be made upon owners of historic houses who may also wish to live in them. But Ham House holds other magnets than its pictures and relics of Stuarts and Lauderdales. The guide-books catalogue the pictures, and perhaps I need not copy the catalogues. The real fascination is Ham House with its history, the meeting-place of the great Cabal. But you may see that Ham House from a distance; the house as the Duke of Lauderdale saw it from the river bank, or driving to the door to join his fellow Ministers; the garden front, with its statue of Father Thames, the statue at which Buckingham and Arlington used to stare, perhaps, wondering how much longer their sinister power would be left to them. All that they knew and saw day by day remains—the dull red brick, the wrought iron gate, the quaint statuary of the walls; and round the garden walls and shading the wide lawn behind the house, the trees as later, gentler souls saw them; Thomson, walking from his Richmond cottage, and Hood, strolling under the long avenue of elms.

Petersham has riverside houses which would dignify Georgian aldermen; square red houses set about with wistaria and high garden walls, worthy to be neighbours of Richmond Park; worthy, too, of a handsomer neighbour than Petersham church, an insignificant little building which yet was thought sufficient for the dust of the Duchess of Lauderdale. Outside in the churchyard lies the sailor who sought for the North-west passage and named Vancouver's Island.



Of Richmond Park, and the view from Richmond Terrace, and the departed glories of Richmond's palace which was the palace of Sheen, what should be said? How should the beauty of the view from the Terrace be measured? Scott has set it in the pages of The Heart of Midlothian, and Scott, perhaps, thought it the loveliest and richest of English landscapes. It was "a huge sea of verdure, with crossing and intersecting promontories of massive and tufted groves." It was "tenanted by numberless flocks and herds, which seemed to wander unrestrained and unbounded through the rich pastures. The Thames, here turreted with villas and there garlanded with forests, moved on slowly and placidly, like the mighty monarch of the scene, to whom all its other beauties were but accessories, and bore on its bosom an hundred barks and skiffs, whose white sails and gaily fluttering pennons gave life to the whole." That was the scene which was shown to Jeanie Deans, arrived at Richmond to sue for pardon for her sister, by the Duke of Argyle. "We have nothing like it in Scotland," said the Duke of Argyle. Is that the secret? Is it because it is all that is typical of south country greenness and the peace of broad water and deep woodlands that it made its appeal to the Scot used to grey crags and barren moorland? Or is its chief appeal not to the Scot but to the Londoner, and does the Londoner praise Sir Walter's taste because Sir Walter has praised his? That is part of the story of the beauty of the Richmond view, perhaps. It is so easily found from London. It has all that the Londoner loves to look at. It is the country as he wishes to see it. A glorious stretch of luxuriant woodland, a noble breadth of shining water, sunlight on wide meadows; but above all, setting a difference between this orderly beauty and the wild splendours of some western or northern moorland valley, the presence of befriending, comrade man. The boats, the sails, the swans, the water flashing on the oars; the neighbouring roofs, the patterned flower gardens, the comforts of hotels at hand, the readiness with which it is all won and enjoyed—those are some of the secrets of the ideal. It is the country seen from an outdoor theatre.



Richmond Park itself would be worth visiting for any countryman because of its deer. Deer standing about in the bracken; deer asleep in thick fern under great oaks; deer feeding slowly up wind on a distant slope of green; deer leaping shadows of tree-stems one after another as if the shadows were water, which is one of the deer's prettiest games in the sun: deer trotting off as you try to come nearer to them, with that curious quivering, shaking amble which is born of lissom daintiness and muscles like steel; deer with hot sunlight on their coats—it is the Richmond Park deer which are the creatures to come and see. How many are there? Who should count them? Sixteen hundred fallow deer and fifty red deer, the figures are given; Farnham Park, I think, comes next in Surrey, with three hundred fallow deer.

The great palace has left little more than an archway on Richmond Green. More history belongs to it, or rather to the succession of palaces which have stood at Sheen, which was the old name, than I can deal with. Edward III died at Sheen Palace, unloved and alone. Richard II's queen, Anne of Bohemia, died there seventeen years later, and Richard in his grief threw the palace down. It was rebuilt by Henry V, burnt down in 1497, rebuilt and renamed Richmond by Henry VII; then the Richmond who named it died in his new palace. But the overmastering sense of unhappiness which somehow has set itself about the story of Richmond Palace belongs to the closing days of Elizabeth. Elizabeth's death, and the month that went before it, patch English history like a week of night. She had been so strong, so untiring, so wise in her council chamber and so magnificent in her victorious fleet, and the fortune that followed her like a wind; the life of her body had been so unfailing, she had jested, wittily and coarsely, with so many courtiers; she had commanded the chivalry of young and splendid nobles, she had lived to see one of her favourites die and to send another to the block; and now she herself was dying. She knew it, and she would not hear of death. She was never so ready for the gaiety she could not enjoy. Her strength left her, she was a skeleton; still she sat with her dress unchanged, staring before her, flashing sudden rages at her ministers, rallying at the mention of an heir's name. Beauchamp, heir to the Suffolks, they put forward; she cried out he was the son of a rogue. The King of Scots? they asked; she answered nothing. Dead, propped among her pillows, an old woman in ruff and stays, the memory of her last days shadows Richmond Palace like a drawn blind.



To the north beyond Richmond Hill and the huge hotel, twice burnt down, which looks over the woods and the river, one may come by tramways and railways to Kew and Kew Gardens. Kew, too, once had a palace, or an attempt at a palace. Frederick Prince of Wales, George III's father—the prince who did so much for Surrey cricket, and died, perhaps, from the blow of a cricket ball—lived at Kew House, and so did George III after him. George III pulled down Kew House in 1803, and built another; to be not less royal, George IV pulled that down. A smaller building, vaguely named Kew Palace still, stands in the Gardens; Queen Charlotte died there; you may see the room, and look, if you wish, on the tables and sofas she knew. But the pictures in Kew Palace were not all Queen Charlotte's; they are catalogued to-day, and so are many manuscripts and autograph letters of royal persons which attract careful readers. From remarks which can be overheard in those sombre rooms, many visitors, I think, imagine the paintings of still life, of flowers in vases, odd representations of game and fruit, and so forth, to have been selected and hung in the house as specially suitable for public gardens. The portraits of royal gentlemen in blue and red puzzle them; why should they be shown these at Kew? These are for palaces and galleries; Kew is for a flower show.

What is the chief, the compelling fascination of Kew Gardens? What is it that sets Kew apart, not more beautiful than other gardens, but different from them, with a different attraction peculiarly its own? Is it the sense of change from roaring streets to quiet lawns, noble trees, spaces and scents of grass and flowers? There may be a sense of change, but that is not all the secret, for Kew keeps the same charm for one who has come fresh from the broad aisles and avenues of some great country garden. Is it the rarity and the wealth of the Kew museums and houses—the orchid houses with their strange, lovely, uncanny inflorescences, flowers that have fancies and wilfulnesses, flowers that would people the dark with faces; or the lily-houses and the superb Victoria regia that would cradle a water-baby; or the great palm houses, where you may walk in a gallery among enormous leaves and tropical creepers as if you were back again with your grandfathers in the tree tops? That is an attraction, but it is not all of it. Nor is it the achievement of the gardens in the separate spheres of gardening. The sheets of crocuses in the low March sunlight, and of daffodils shaking in an April wind, add a glory to the spring at Kew, but it is a glory that can belong to other lawns and other vistas of flowers. The Kew rose-garden has a wealth of roses, but it has, too, a wealth of old tree stems and broken branches which a garden meant for nothing but roses would hide. The herbaceous border grows luxuriant phloxes and delphiniums, but the background of glass houses sets a wrong light about it. The rock garden shows more rock and fewer masses of Alpine flowers than other English gardens more lately made, with better knowledge of what wall and rock flowers need.

Then what is the abiding charm? To me, at all events, Kew has much the same appeal as the Londoner finds in Richmond Hill. It is a London garden, the garden of a town, perfectly made for its purpose. It can never, even with its glorious trees and its wide spaces of grass, have the peace or know the spirit of a country garden. Too many feet tread its lawns; too many voices chatter in its walks. It may spread its wild flowers and grow its curious blossoms for those who know where and how to look for them; but its main effects must be of ordered gravel, of shaven grass, of patterned beds, of flowers that will suit artificial lakes and buildings and stone balustrades. The keynote of Kew is by the wide pond, with the smooth green turf and the white stone, and the masses of pansies and heliotrope and brilliant red geraniums. Those are the flowers which suit best the steps down to the water, and the fountains, and the swimming ducks and the birds on the banks. There is the right touch of artificiality about them; the right note of London. The birds are Londoners themselves. The stately brown geese stalk over the lawns careless of poulterers or punt-guns. The cormorant, who most certainly knows he is being watched, dives to show off before admiring children. Even the blackbirds have forgotten their country habits, and will sing when country blackbirds are silent for the year. Once, late in July, I heard four singing in evening sunshine after rain. They would take any countryman back to the days of chestnut blossom and the scent of Surrey may; but that indolent melody, in July sunshine, belongs to London.



CHAPTER XXII

KINGSTON

Kingston Old and New.—The Stone.—The Sexton's Escape.—Throwing over the Church.—Ducking a Scold.—Aaron Evans's shot at a Cormorant.—The Dog Whipper.—A Feast of the Church.—Lord Francis Villiers's fight.



Kingston has kept little of the past. An old alehouse, old almshouses, an old staircase, an old roof or two by the market place, and an old chapel, Lovekyn's, standing apart—the survivals are the loneliest things. Lovekyn's, once a chapel, and now a school, is one of the links. Gibbon was a scholar there, and Gibbon belongs doubly to Surrey; he was born at Putney. But the changes at Kingston have made it almost all new, and the changes have come quickly. Only three or four years ago the quaint, small Harrow Inn had two companions, the Anglers and the Three Compasses, one with a fireside corner to warm ale and tell grandfathers' tales in, the other with traditions of highwaymen and the road. They were pulled down. In Market Place there was once a fine Tudor house, the Castle Inn. The noble staircase remains, a good, thoroughgoing piece of carving of Bacchus and full casks; the house has gone. The church is old enough to have seen these and other losses; but the church is a mixed building; the tower, or most of it, is eighteenth century brick. Only one spot in the open streets of the town, I think, keeps an air of Kingston as the customers of the Castle Inn may have known it, and that is the little byway through which runs the water splash of the Hogsmill river. Cart horses standing in the ford, and bare-legged children fishing for minnows, are what Kingston saw in the old days.

The Stone remains; the Stone on which tradition says that the Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned. Once it stood in the chapel of St. Mary, a Saxon building adjoining the church; but St. Mary's Chapel fell in 1730. It was moved to the Market Place; afterwards in 1854, to the open space where it now stands opposite the Court-house; on the very spot, they say, where there was once an Anglo-Saxon palace. The railing which surrounds it has been described as "of Saxon-like design," and perhaps that should suffice. On the pedestal which bears up the Stone are the names of the kings who were crowned on it: Edward the Elder, Ethelstan, Edmund, Edred, Edwig, Edward the Martyr, and Ethelred the Unready. What is the Kings' Stone? A morasteen, the archaeologists tell you; one of a circle of stones, on which the chief sat in council with his great men; the predecessors of the Anglo-Saxon chiefs would have been Arch-Druids, perhaps, or pontiff kings, acclaimed by ancient Britons centuries before the Romans set foot in Kent.



Kingston church, if its architecture is confused and much of it modern, has an imposing solemnity about it, and it contains some strange memorials. One is a stone fragment, on which the grateful survivor of an accident and a ruin has painted the words "Life Preserved." She was Hester Hammerton, daughter of Abram Hammerton, sexton of the church, and in 1729 she was helping her father to dig a grave in the churchyard near the Saxon chapel of St. Mary. They dug too near the chapel foundations, and the chapel fell in upon them. The sexton was killed, almost on the spot; his daughter was saved through the jamming of a piece of stone, and survived him as sexton for fifteen years. Another memorial is a brass kept in the vestry; a long screed begins dismally enough—"Ten children in one grave—a dreadful sight"; but the verse is unequal to the opportunity. Another brass shows Robert Skern and his wife Joan; she, according to Manning and Bray, was a daughter of Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III. A fourth monument, said to be in the chancel (but I did not find it), praises Mrs. Mary Morton, daughter of the wife of Robert Honeywood, of Charinge, Kent; she was "the Wonder of her Sex and this Age, for she liv'd to see near 400 issued from her Loynes." So Aubrey describes it, and so, with variations, the local historian. Mrs. Mary Morton died in 1620.

Aubrey has another record of the giants of those days. He had heard of one Wiltshire of the Feathers Inn at Kingston, who was a great thrower. He would stand in the churchyard and throw a stone over the weathercock; "he would also throw a stone over the Thames (by the bridge) and struck the pales on the town side, which (I think) was not so difficult as the other throw. He was then of middle stature, and about thirty years of age." But if he had grown to greater stature? The weathercock of those days is no more, or we might measure the throw.

Kingston has other history besides its coronation stone and its monuments. The Parish Registers have added pictures of its past. Here is one of two poor women allowed to beg at the church:—

February 1571.

24. Sonday was here ij wemen the mother and dowghter owte of Ireland she called Elynor Salve to gather upon the deathe of her howsbande a genllman slayne amongst the wylde Iryshe being Captain of Gully glasses and gathered xviijd.

Here is a record of a Thames flood, October 9, 1570:—

Thursday at nyght rose a great winde and rayne that the Temps rosse so hye that they myght row w^t bott^s owte of the Temps a gret waye in to the market place and upon a sodayne.

In the year 1572 Kingston got a new cucking stool; the Kingston scolds had become past bearing. It cost L1 3s. 4d., and as soon as it was finished there was a very shrewish woman ducked in it.

1572 August. On Tewsday being the xix daye of this monthe of August —— Downing wyfe to —— Downinge gravemaker of this paryshe she was sett on a new cukking stolle made of a grett hythe and so browght a bowte the markett place to Temes brydge and ther had iij Duckinges over hed and eres becowse she was a common scolde and fyghter.

Here are extracts from the burial registers:—

June 4. 1593. John Akerleye wentte too bathe hymsellfe and was drownde & buryede.

August 25. 1598. William Hall was bered being shott by thefes when he was Constabl at Coblers Hol.

September 28. 1623. Richard Ratlive a Londenner which was slayne.

17 January 1623/4 W^m Foster son of W^m a goer about.

This is hardly a burial:—

July 11. 1629. A Bird called a Cormorant light on the top of the steeple and Aaron Evans shot, but mist it.

Here are items from the churchwarden's accounts. The parish dog whipper had become an institution:—

1561. To fawcon for di yere (half a year) whyppyng of doggs oute of the churche. viijd

1578. To wrighte for beating the dogges out of the churche, for half a yeare. vjd.

But the morris dance—it was the dances that Kingston would spend money upon. There were two kinds of games which brought gifts to the church, May-games and the Kyngham. What sort of a game the Kyngham was nobody knows, but it brought the churchwardens most of their money: four or five pounds was a good collection. But the expenses could be heavy; there were shoes for the morris dancers, six pairs at 8d. a pair; there was silver paper for the dance, 8d.; and there were for the feast, besides other drinking, a quarter of malt, 4s.; 5 goce (geese), 15d.; eggs, 6d.; lamb, 18d.; sugar, cloves, and mace, 11d.; small raisins, 3d.; saffern, 2d.; vinegar and salt, 3d.; 2 cocks, 18d.; 2 calves, 5s. 8d.; sheep, 12d.; lamb, 16d.; quarter of veal, 8d.; quarter of mutton, 6d.; leg of veal and a neck, 4d. The morris dancers did well, with silver paper and new shoes; but the church kept a feast.

Kingston has the credit of the first and the last battles in the Parliamentary wars, but the claim is a little shaky. There was an affair of outposts between Rupert's cavalry and some Parliamentarian troops between Oatlands and Kingston bridge in the year 1642—after Edgehill—but it was not a battle. The real battle of Kingston came six years later, and ended all the warfare that Surrey saw. That was the battle which crushed Lord Holland's scheme of raising London for the King. We shall meet Lord Holland at Reigate; but the fighting belongs to Kingston. Holland, who had planned a rising on Banstead Downs, and had hoped to capture and hold Reigate Castle, was in full retreat. At Reigate he had feared to hold the position he had taken up; he retreated on Dorking, and from Dorking, pursued by Major Audley of Livesey's Horse, he fled north. On Kingston Common, a little south-east of where Surbiton to-day takes train for London, his horse turned on their enemy; his infantry fell back. From each side a few spurred out, "playing valiantly," Audley writes. But the Royalists were beaten. Lord Francis Villiers, younger brother to the Duke of Buckingham, a boy of great personal beauty, fought alone in their rear. His horse was shot under him; he backed towards an elm, and fought with six of them. They came up behind him, pushed off his helmet and cut him to the ground. Report came to London that he was wounded, and orders were sent out to care for him. But he was found dead, and his pockets were rifled. The evening was the end of the war in Surrey.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE DITTONS AND WALTON

Surbiton trains.—Thames Ditton.—Parks for trotting ponies.—A forlorn garden.—The Dandies' Fete.—Graveyard poetry.—The Pleasance of a Ferry.—Giggs Hill cricket.—Ditton Tulips.—Hampton Bridge.—A dreary road.—Walton.—The Scold's Bridle.—John Selwyn and the Stag.—Terror at an elephant.—William Lilly, astrologer.

Surbiton is a growth of seventy years, and was born when the railway came. Once it was called a suburb of Kingston; now it has suburbs of its own. Tramways join it to London; the railway empties Surbiton into London every morning and pours London back again in the evening. Nearly seventy trains a day stop at Surbiton on their way down from Waterloo; nearly eighty stop on their way up. It must be quite inspiriting to lose your train, and to know that you have only three minutes to wait; or to catch the train before your train, or to choose which you will have of two trains. Until you realise these figures, it is difficult to understand why so many people are rushing about late for the train in Surbiton station. They are catching the train before.

But Surbiton is not all villas; or perhaps it is, and it would be truer to say that what is not villas within hail of the station is not Surbiton. Thames Ditton lies rather more than a mile away, and Long Ditton, between Thames Ditton and the railway, straggling, too, beyond the railway. Thames Ditton is rapidly becoming rich and prosperous. A few years ago it was a little, twisting main street, a ferry, an inn or two, and a church, and was flanked by two fine properties, Ember Court and Boyle Farm. Now the villa-builder has got to work, and the old estates are being sliced up into acres and half acres. Ember Court was once a manor belonging to Henry VIII, who hunted over it; later, it was the property of Sir Arthur Onslow, the first Speaker of the House of Commons who earned the title "Great." It is now a racecourse; trotting ponies and American "machines" dash and flash where Mr. Speaker sauntered staidly, and theatre bills flare at the entrance gates. Boyle Farm has fared little better. Once it was the Duchess of Gloucester's, wife of George the Third's brother; a century later, Lord St. Leonards, Lord Chancellor in Lord Derby's first and shortest-lived Ministry, had it. Now the park is criss-crossed with brand new yellow roads. I walked through it while it was still ringing with the builder's hammer; and straying off the gravel, suddenly found myself in the forlornest little place possible—a formal garden, box-trimmed, tiny, deserted; the narrow, carefully-planned beds nothing but weeds, the summerhouse at the side a ruin. A park cut to pieces looks as if it were in anguish. But a garden cries.

The river at Thames Ditton in 1827 saw a festival which was doubtless considered one of the most prodigious affairs of the season. Five young bloods, of whom two were the Lords Castlereagh and Chesterfield of the day, subscribed L500 each to organise an enormous water party, to which, presumably, everybody was invited who was worth inviting. It was a superb occasion, with illuminations, quadrilles on the lawn, singers from the opera, covers for five hundred people, and all adornments proper to such gaiety. Afterwards it came to be known as the Dandies' Fete, and Tom Moore wrote a set of verses about it, which, perhaps, reflect fairly accurately the wit of the company. Here are nine lines out of many:—

"Accordingly, with gay Sultanas, Rebeccas, Sapphos, Roxalanas— Circassian slaves, whom Love would pay Half his maternal realms to ransom;— Young nuns, whose chief religion lay In looking most profanely handsome! Muses in muslin—pastoral maids, With hats from the Arcade-ian shades; And fortune-tellers—rich, 'tis plain, As fortune-hunters, form'd their train."

Moore sent the verses to Mrs. Norton; she, perhaps, was a Circassian or a nun.

But Thames Ditton has had its own poet. He has been dignified by the criticism of Charles Lamb, and his accomplishment was the composing of epitaphs. "What is the reason," Lamb writes to Wordsworth in 1810, "we have no good epitaphs after all?"

A very striking instance might be found in the churchyard of Ditton-upon-Thames, if you know such a place. Ditton-upon-Thames has been blessed by the residence of a poet, who for love or money, I do not well know which, has dignified every gravestone, for the last few years, with brand-new verses, all different, and all ingenious, with the author's name at the bottom of each. This sweet Swan of Thames has so artfully diversified his strains and his rhymes, that the same thought never occurs twice; more justly, perhaps, as no thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same thought should recur. It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions, but I remember the impression was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of instruction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word 'death' he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, till he had learned to speak of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word 'God' in a pulpit; and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or further than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the sounding-board of the pulpit.

But the epitaphs were trim, and sprag, and potent, and pleased the survivors of Thames-Ditton above the old Mumpsimus of 'Afflictions Sore'....

The church itself, or at all events the squat and tiny tower, has not altered much since Lamb saw it. But the epitaphs have gone. Search among the ivies and yews of the shady little churchyard will discover a number of flat, weatherworn slabs of stone, but the verses and the signatures have vanished. Fire and the wastepaper man are the common lot of poets, but this "Swan of Thames" has come to his end by rain and hobnails. The only Swan that remains is the inn, whose sign sits comfortably above the front door, white and bright. Few Thames-side inns have a prettier outlook, or look prettier from the river. Sunlight on shining brown boats and quivering willows is a frequent memory of Thames waters, but the Swan lies also opposite a ferry, and a ferry has a hundred fascinations. Old fashioned rowing, running water, hailings and signallings, quiet motion, thriving business, new arrivals; it is all the cheerfullest of riverside traffic. None of the pleasanter services of travel can be more directly rendered and directly paid for than being ferried across a river.

Of Surrey village greens, the Thames Ditton Ground at Giggs Hill has had much to do with Surrey cricket. Giggs Hill cricket has not always been of the most scientific kind, but who shall say it was less enjoyed for that? An old Giggs Hill cricketer tells us how the pitch used to be prepared for a match. "I remember," he says, "seeing the late Harry Stowell with an old beer barrel fixed on a trolley and filled with water, wheeling it across the wicket. He would well douse the pitch, and after running a small garden roller he had borrowed up and down a few times the wicket was ready." This proceeding took place the day before the match, so that batting must occasionally have been a venturesome business. In those days a match meant what it still means in some villages, an adjournment in the evening to the neighbouring inn, a supper, beer, and songs. How many old inns still keep the name "The Jolly Cricketers," and how many for little reason! In later days, Thames Ditton cricket has become scientific enough. The Giggs Hill ground has sent to the Oval cricketers like H.H. Stephenson, who was making centuries for the county in the sixties; in modern times the great Maurice Read, whom Mr. John Shuter has described as having "started a new order among cricket professionals," learned his cricket at Thames Ditton. But the greatest of all Thames Ditton cricketers is, of course, Tom Richardson. He was actually born at Byfleet, but played as a boy at Giggs Hill.

Thames Ditton's sister, Long Ditton, is probably known by sight by thousands of people who do not know its name. You are looking at the best of Long Ditton when you see Barr's nursery gardens from the train window. There is hardly a month in the year, except in the deep of midwinter, when the Ditton Hill gardens are not full of blossom. They are never more glorious than in May and early June, when the long parterres glow with the tall, late-flowering tulips. Of all flowers which have been added to English gardens in the last twenty years, the great thirty inch tulips seem to me the finest. A giant daffodil can be superb, but it always looks like a giant. But these tulips have the grace of slightness and the majesty of height; their open chalices burn with the heat of jewels and the depth of the heart of wine; and here are ten thousand of them. Perhaps the daffodils, earlier in the year, light the gardens with a fresher lustre; but the tulips have the colour and the glow. Railways have the good luck to run by many nursery gardens; the tulips at Ditton Hill would help the South Western to challenge any line.

On the other side of Thames Ditton ferry lies Hampton Court Park, a noble stretch of ordered green. From the ferry to Hampton Court Bridge is a mile by river, and nearly twice as much by road, which runs through East Molesey. There is little of interest in either of the Moleseys, East or West, but it is worth walking a dull mile or two to look down stream from the Bridge over Henry VIII's palace, with its yews and elms, dark and stately, in the garden beyond the imposing walls. There is a far more comprehensive view of Hampton Court to be had from the railway or the river, but it is still a fine pile of brick seen down stream from the Bridge. Up stream, Hampton Church stands a mile away at the bend of the river, grey in the sunshine; between the church and the bridge is the lock, bright with boats in summer, and the weir, tumbling down a roar of green water to make roach-swims and barbel-swims for patient fishermen. In the road to the left you may catch sight or sound of one of the London coaches, with its white-hatted driver and painted panels, well named the Vivid. Molesey's roads carry away many of the motor cars that run to Hampton Court; but the old Vivid still jangles hopefully after them.

North and west of Molesey runs the ugliest road in Surrey. It begins with the paling running round the Hurst Park racecourse, and it goes on between the ramparts of enormous reservoirs. To stand on the edge of one of these great basins of water (it is strictly forbidden to do so) is to get a new meaning of desolation. They are horribly deep—you can see how deep if you stand above one which is half empty; the sides slope so steeply that if you fell in you could never climb out again, and they are the loneliest stretches of water conceivable. No bird has any need that brings him to water that has no shelter and no food. Once I watched a sunset in November across one of these reservoirs. When the sun sank low the water blackened; the wind drove little waves slapping with foam against the stone bank; a single sea-gull swept up out of the dark and fled away down wind like a scrap of torn paper; it was the most solitary ending a day could have.

The reservoirs by Molesey stretch far back from the river. Nearer the river the birds find them more hospitable. I remember a day in October when I stood watching the martins making one of their last halts on the way south over the reservoirs on the river bank at Surbiton. It was a pouring wet afternoon, there was a high wind, and the rain drove bubbles in the ruffled water and half blotted the greens and greys of blown willows and the russet of thorn berries on the far side of the river. A short trolley line ran down a stone pier from beside the road to the edge of the water, where a barge with a bright brown sail waited; the smoke from a clinker fire built in a pierced bucket swept fitfully about the pier; grimy men loaded a car on the trolley line. Over the grey-blue water hundreds of house-martins dipped and darted and chattered; my umbrella blew inside out, a few scared birds near me tossed up into the sky and fell down again, joining the hundreds circling and curtseying in the wind and the rain.

The road from Molesey runs west to Walton-on-Thames, where you strike the river high enough to find it running through something like real country. Walton has an interesting old manor house and a Norman church a good deal spoiled by restorers. In the vestry, preserved in a cabinet made out of an old beam from the belfry, is a relic of days when women talked too much—a scold's or gossip's bridle. It is a sort of cage shaped to fit the head and made of steel, which time has rusted and blackened. A kind of bit is arranged to go into the scold's mouth and hold her tongue, and according to those who have been voluntarily bridled—nobody can remember a scold in Walton—it answers its purpose admirably. When the bit is in and the bridle properly padlocked the most vixenish can only utter inarticulate murmurs.



Among some curious old brasses in the church is one which commemorates, "John Selwyn 'gent,' Keeper of her Matis Parke of Oteland vnder ye right honorable Charles Howward Lord Admyrall of England his good Lord and Mr." He died on March 22, 1587, and his brass illustrates a remarkable incident. John Selwyn, dressed in a most workmanlike costume like a Scots gillie with a ruff, is shown riding on the back of a stag, into whose throat he is plunging a great hunting-knife. Two stories explain the picture. One, told in the Antiquarian Repertory, is that Selwyn, "in the heat of the chase, suddenly leaped from his horse upon the back of the stag (both running at that time with their utmost speed), and not only kept his seat gracefully in spite of every effort of the affrighted beast, but, drawing his sword, with it guided him toward the Queen, and coming near her presence, plunged it in his throat, so that the animal fell dead at her feet." Another version told locally is that the stag was charging Queen Elizabeth when the keeper rode up, leapt on its back and killed it, but was killed by the stag as it fell. It does not seem impossible. Against the story of the keeper being killed in rescuing the Queen, Mr. F.W. Smith, a local authority, has urged that Queen Elizabeth would hardly have been hunting six weeks after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and also when the Armada was almost on its way. But nobody in England, certainly not Drake, ever stopped doing anything because the Armada was coming, and as for hunting six weeks after the death of Mary Queen of Scots, that would be nothing out of the way for Queen Elizabeth. A huge oak, thirty feet in girth, is spoken of as the tree under which the stag was killed at the Queen's feet, but nobody could tell me where it was. There are many superb oaks in the gardens in Walton and Weybridge. Once the whole district was included in Windsor Park.

Hidden in a group of obscure cottages stands the old manor-house, partly preserved as a curiosity, partly as an addition to a garden. The house was not improved by an experience for some years as a tenement dwelling, crowded with more families than it should have held. It was rescued from that indignity by its present possessor, Mr. Lowther Bridger. Heavy beams, oak panels, and a fine chimney-piece remain, relics of the Stuart days when John Bradshaw, President of the Council, had the house. Tradition, certainly wrongly, says that Bradshaw signed Charles's death-warrant in the hall. Bradshaw, no doubt, signed it at Westminster. But the association of his name would be enough for village gossip. "The place where they cut off the king's head," is a variant of the story.

Above Walton Bridge are Coway Stakes, where Julius Caesar is supposed to have crossed the Thames in pursuit of Cassivellaunus, king of the Catuvellauni. The British chief drove sharpened stakes into the bed of the river, to block the ford, and built a palisade along the bank, where he waited for the enemy. They came on, cavalry and infantry, in spite of the stakes. The Catuvellauni would have met them, but fled in horror at the sight of an armoured elephant.

A great cricketer is buried in Walton churchyard, and a great astrologer in the church. The cricketer was Lumpy Stevens, whom we met at Send. The astrologer was William Lilly, author of a yearly publication, Merlinus Anglicus Junior, a sort of Old Moore's Almanac. The prophecies of storms, fires and disasters were as dull reading then as they are now, but one or two entries in his Life and Times, written by himself, are illuminating, especially his record of family amenities, thus:—

"The 16th of February 1653/4, my second Wife died; for whose Death I shed no Tears. I had 500l. with her as a Portion, but she and her poor Relations spent me 1000l. Gloria Patri, & Filio, & Spiritui Sancto: sicul erat in principio et nunc et semper, & in saecula saeculorum: For the 20th of April 1653, these Enemies of mine, viz. Parliament-men, were turned out of doors by Oliver Cromwell."

"In October 1654, I married the third Wife, who is signified in my Nativity by Jupiter in Libra: And she is so totally in her Conditions, to my great Comfort."

Lilly got into trouble with the Parliament men later. He had predicted a town in conflagration, and when the Fire of London occurred in 1666 he was accused of having caused it. He had to appear before a Parliamentary committee specially sitting on the matter, but he was able to satisfy the chairman that he had nothing to do with the fire. He admitted that he had drawn mysterious designs of persons in winding sheets and digging graves, which were to foretell the plague, and of towers and houses on fire, which might have meant the city of London blazing; but he had never fixed the exact year for these things to happen. So the committee let him off. If he had lived till the next century, when William the Third's horse had thrown his rider, and the Jacobite toast was "the little gentleman in black velvet," Lilly could have pointed with pride to other cabalistic drawings in his Merlin One shows a mole walking about under a dragon; another, a mole attacking a crown.



CHAPTER XXIV

EPSOM

The Widest Street in Surrey.—A lucky find.—Barbara Villiers.—Pepys at the Wells.—Nell Gwynne.—Aldermen and lazy ladies.—Epsom's fall.—A knavish apothecary.—Baron Swasso, his house.—Miss Wallin, bone-setter; bone-setter, Mrs. Mapp.—Epsom re-made at the table.—Eclipse.—The Road to the Derby.—The Ring round the Gibbet.—Catherine-wheels, Motor-cars, Kites, Pills.—Lord Rosebery.—Lord Lyttelton's ghost.

Epsom is the centre of the country between the great railway lines. It has its own railway, but it is midway between the lines that run express trains to Brighton and Southampton: Epsom's own expresses only run for two weeks in the year, when the races come round. For the other fifty weeks Epsom is a quiet town of villas, once a village, now nearly a suburb like Esher or Weybridge. Lord Rosebery sometimes lives near the town, at Durdans, and deplores the large numbers of lunatics who are brought to live near the town always. But Epsom is only occasionally ruffled by the lunatics, and has developed a dangerously good train service.

Epsom has the widest and breeziest main street of any Surrey town, and you do not guess the reason until you read the history of the town pretty closely. The story of Epsom, until the two great races that belong to its downs were founded over Lord Derby's wine, is the story of its wells. Before Epsom Salts there was hardly an Epsom to give them a name. There may have been a tiny village where the church stands, but that would be all; the rector preached to a few cottagers. Then, one hot summer day in 1618, the lucky thing happened. Henry Wicker, trying to water his cattle on the common, found a small hole with a spring in it; he enlarged it, and took the cattle to the water, but could not make them drink. Then the doctors were told about it. They used it first, as Pownall the local historian tells you, "as a vulnerary and abstersive," and healed wounds with it; then some labourers accidentally drank it, and Epsom's fortune was made. The doctors agreed; Epsom salts were bitter, diluent, absorbent, soluble, cathartic—everything that salts should be. In two years the wells were enclosed with a wall; in twenty years France and Germany had heard of Epsom, and distinguished foreigners obediently paced the common. But the great days were still to come. As yet few buildings had grown up close to the Wells, merely "a shed to shelter the sickly visitors." Then came the year 1670, when Charles II gave Barbara Villiers his palace of Nonsuch two miles away. She, as careless of a king's gift and as avaricious as a king's mistress should be, turned the palace into cash, and out of its demolished walls the local builder piled up houses by Epsom Wells.

One of Epsom's inns was already built, the King's Head—perhaps the Old King's Head near the church, or an inn on the same site. Pepys was there in 1667, and gives us a glimpse of Nell Gwynne, though she was at Epsom to amuse herself, and was not one of Pepys's party. Pepys went on July 14th (Lord's day); he got up at four in the morning, and talked to Mrs. Turner downstairs while his wife dressed, and got angry with Mrs. Pepys because she was so long about it. They were off in the coach by five, with bottles of wine and beer, and a cold fowl, and talked all the way pleasantly, Pepys writes, and so came "to Epsom, by eight o'clock, to the well; where much company, and I drank the water: they did not but I did drink four pints. And to the town, to the King's Head; and hear that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir Charles Sedley with them; and keep a merry house." Lord Buckhurst had just persuaded Nell Gwynne to leave the King's playhouse for a hundred pounds a year and his company: she was to act no more, which saddened Pepys. However, she was back at the playhouse next month, jeered at by the graceful Buckhurst and as poor as ever. She was less exacting than Barbara Villiers: she never had a palace to sell.

When Nonsuch was built up again into Durdans and other houses near the Wells, then came the full tide. Epsom was completed. About the year 1690, Pownall dates the climax: Mr. Parkhurst, lord of the manor, built a ball-room seventy feet long, and the inns sprang up on all sides. "Taverns at that time reputed to be the largest in England were opened; sedan chairs and numbered coaches attended, there was a public breakfast, with dancing and music every morning at the Wells. There was also a ring, as in Hyde Park; and on the downs races were held daily at noon; with cudgelling and wrestling matches, foot races, &c., in the afternoon. The evenings were usually spent in private parties, assemblies or cards; and we may add, that neither Bath nor Tunbridge ever boasted of more noble visitors than Epsom, or exceeded it in splendour, at the time we are describing." So Pownall praises the great days; but they have not left a glamour about Epsom, as the days of Nash and Brummell have shed on Bath.

Why has Epsom so broad a main street? In the great days the open way was narrower. Down the centre of the road as we see it Mr. Parkhurst planted a long walk of elms, and there they stood from James the Second's day till the nineteenth century. Then Sir Joseph Mawbey, lord of the manor, cut them down and sold the timber. He made a good bargain too; for the townpeople were grieved at losing their trees, and to quiet them he promised to give L200 to help build a market-house, but he never did it, and kept the cash. The trunks of the fallen trees must have made a pleasant prospect for the New Inn, the fine red-brick building which in Parkhurst's day was built for a tavern, and which still stands, but has now fallen to shops. But in the days when the city aldermen brought their wives to show off their finery, and the young sparks threw their money about at Epsom, what a bustling, handsome, pursy, turtle-soup sort of place the Wells must have been. John Toland, writing in 1711, describes Epsom Wells at their height. Eudoxa is his mistress, and to Eudoxa he pictures all Epsom's charms. I quote a few passages from a long letter:—

"Here are two bowling-greens with raffling shops and musick for the ladies' diversion, as at Tunbridge; but the ladies do not appear every day on the walks as there. Here you see them, on Saturdays, in the evening, as their husbands come from London; on Sundays at church, and on Mondays in all their splendour, when there are balls in the Long-rooms; and many of them shake their elbows at Passage and Hazard with a good grace."

Surely they never forgave Toland for writing that. Here he writes on the ladies' husbands:—"By the conversation of those that walk there, you would fancy yourself to be this minute on the Exchange, and the next at St. James's; one while in an East India factory, and another while with the army in Flanders, or on board the fleet in the Ocean; nor is there any profession, trade, or calling that you can miss of here, either for your instruction or diversion."

Thus does Toland, unkinder than Pownall, set out the glories of Epsom without comparing them to Bath. But what could be better than the luxury of it all? "You would think yourself in some enchanted camp, to see the peasants ride to every house with the choicest fruits, herbs, roots and flowers; with all sorts of tame and wild fowl, with the rarest fish and venison, and with every kind of butcher's meat, among which Banstead-down mutton is the most relishing dainty. Thus, to see the fresh and artless damsels of the plain, either accompanied by their amorous swains or aged parents, striking their bargains with the nice court and city ladies, who, like queens in a tragedy, display all their finery on benches before their doors (where they hourly censure, and are censured), and to observe how the handsomest of each degree equally admire, envy and cozen one another, is to me one of the chiefest amusements of the place. The ladies who are too lazy, or too stately, but especially those who sit up late at cards have their provisions brought to their bedsides, where they conclude the bargain with the higler; and then—perhaps after a dish of chocolate—take another nap, till what they have thus purchased is got ready for dinner."

One single attraction Toland admits Epsom never had—it lacks a river. "One thing is wanting—and happy is the situation that wants no more; for in this place notwithstanding the medicinal waters, and sufficient of sweetes for domestic use, are not to be heard the precipitant murmurs of impetuous cascades. There are no purling streams in our groves, to tempt the shrill notes of the warbling choristers, whose never-ceasing concerts exceed Bononcini and Corelli."

That was in 1711; Epsom never saw better days in spite of the lack of those miraculous concerts. And in 1715 it had all come to an end. Epsom's glories tumbled like a pack of cards. It was the fault of one man: Pownall has gibbeted the rascal; Epsom fell through the "knavery of Mr. John Livingstone, an apothecary." Mr. Livingstone may have been a knave, but he was also evidently a fool. He began admirably, as a doctor with a speculative eye should do, by building a large house with an assembly room for dancing and music, "and other rooms for raffling, diceing, fairchance (what a perversion of terms!) and all sorts of gaming; together with shops for milliners, jewellers, toymen, etc." He was quite a heathen, for he planted a grove, and he made a bowling-green, and then spoiled it all by sinking a well, putting a pump to it, and calling the place the New Wells. The new water was neither diluent, nor absorbent, nor cathartic, nor anything else that water at a watering-place should be, and the visitors found out the difference. But the end was the maddest thing of all. Somehow or other, John Livingstone got a lease of the old wells, the real, genuine spring. Then he locked up the old wells, and tried to make money with the new. It killed the watering-place.

But Epsom revived—to relapse and revive again. First, it was brought to life again by the South Sea Bubble, which would have brought to life anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but she was not so crazy. Miss Wallin was a bone-setter: she could put in a man's shoulder without help, and she was not to be imposed upon. Once a cheat came to her with his head done up in a bandage, and asked her to set his dislocated wrist for him; it was not dislocated, and he wanted to show Miss Wallin up as an impostor. She saw through that, and dislocated his wrist on the spot, telling him to go back to the fools that sent him. Such a woman should have been kept at Epsom; she was worth more than mere cathartic waters. But Epsom could not keep her; she desired more than anything else in the world to marry one Mr. Hill Mapp, who did not and would not live at Epsom. She pursued him, always with an eye on the church, and Mapp capitulated; but they were married in London. Epsom took back Mrs. Mapp, but she could not live for ever.