about Woking Junction, a town that has grown up fast in one generation to attract some score thousand people scattered roomily over a parish whose centre of gravity became shifted by the railway. Among its public buildings is one notable for singularity among Surrey pine-woods, a Mohammedan mosque at the south end of a row of brick buildings beside the down line of the railway as it approaches Woking station. This exotic institution was planted by the late Dr. Leitner as a college for Oriental students of different creeds; and at the other end the mosque had or was to have had its juwab in a temple for Hindoo devotions; but since the death of its eclectically pious founder, the enterprise seems to have come to nought.

The amplest stretch of what is called Chobham Common lies some miles away, upon the Berkshire edge. The best way of reaching this from London is to get out at the border station of Sunningdale; then at once one can mount to the common, on this side subdued by its inevitable destiny to be cut up with lines of houses and swept by a fire of golf balls. Due south one has still a fine open walk by sandy tracks and among ragged thickets, making what our fathers called a dreary waste; then come the wooded ridges and peopled hollows of Windlesham, one of Surrey’s most pleasant nooks, that, fortunately for its peacefulness, is not too near a railway station. There is one at Bagshot, to which a path leads over the valley of the Windle, striking into the high-road from Egham beside Bagshot Park, a hunting lodge of former kings, now the seat of H. R. H. the Duke of Connaught. Bagshot, a noted coach station, twenty-six miles from London, that fell into some decay when railways overshadowed roads, has been reviving again in our time. Its chief fame is the nursery gardens of a well-known firm, with its huge holly hedges, the most imposing of which may be sought out above the Church.

Beyond, the road rises on Bagshot Heath, at the “Jolly Farmer,” a mile on, forking for Basingstoke and for Winchester by either side of Crawley Hill. This inn was once known as the “Golden Farmer,” a name connected with Dick Turpin, when the road over Bagshot Heath made a Harley Street of his profession. The then lonely heath has borne a crop of military and other institutions, which people the new town of Camberley in the fork of the roads, its villas also sought as a retreat for “captains and colonels and knights at arms.” The extensive woods on the Berkshire side are pierced by a Roman road, and by a fan of long, straight ridges that look like War Office work, nine of them converging at a point called the Star Post, from which other fine woodland walks go northward to Ascot, westward to Broadmoor and Wellington College—but one must not be tempted to expatiate on this trim wilderness where Hants, Berks, and Surrey meet among the heaths and pine ridges shutting in the Blackwater valley.

The right fork of the high-road soon leads us past the Staff College and Sandhurst into Hampshire, reached by the left fork at Frimley. To keep inside of Surrey, and to have one of the finest walks in the county, I should choose the byroad which at the “Jolly Farmer” turns south along the Chobham ridges. Here, some miles west of Chobham village, rises a sandy bank about 400 feet high, beautifully covered with heath, ferny copses and pine-wood, where one might believe oneself in the Highlands but for the open prospects on either hand. The sides of late years have been cut up by the building of various institutions; and towards the farther end of the four-mile road it is frowned on by War Office notices that trespassers are within range of stray bullets from the Pirbright and Bisley ranges lying below the east side. While firing goes on, there will be a red flag on the bold edge of Windmill Hill, which at the south end of the ridge drops brokenly to the railway and the Basingstoke Canal. This long unfortunate waterway, one understands, is now restored, and to be worked by a new proprietor. But whether full or empty, it gives a very pleasant walk by its bushy banks, often shaded by firs or birchwood, its winding reaches, its sedgy bays and lagoons, and its heathy environment. These features are especially un-canal-like on the first crooked bend beyond Windmill Hill towards Aldershot.

In the other direction, a couple of miles of it leads to Brookwood station, past the Pirbright Camp of the Guards on the opposite side. Behind this lie the ranges of Bisley, where the volunteer camp, transplanted from Wimbledon, blossoms out so gaily and jollily for a July fortnight, during which our amateur soldiers bear warlike hardships, made not too uncomfortable, the worst of it being usually a thunderstorm or two that put whiskered Pandours of Fleet Street to their shifts. The nucleus of permanent buildings appears on a low height north-west of Brookwood station, then, beyond, the ranges run up against the Chobham ridge, where barren banks display the “Hundred Butts” and other groups of targets like that nicknamed “Siberia,” or the sliding course of the “Running Deer,” so familiar to ambitious marksmen. On the north side the knolls of the camp look to the no longer secluded village of Bisley, with its outskirts Donkey Green and West End, growing along the roads towards Bagshot and Windlesham.

On the other side of the railway spreads a great Camp of the Dead, which Londoners will style Woking Cemetery, to the indignation of that lively young town, three or four miles away. The Brookwood burying-ground, belonging to the London Necropolis Company, is the largest in the country, and in beauty grows into competition with some of the elaborate cemeteries of American cities. Laid out half a century ago, on part of a large estate belonging to the Company, it encloses 500 acres of sandy land, which, among its native turf and heather, has been planted with flower-beds, clumps of wood, banks of rhododendrons and other shrubs, that go to disguise the gloomy shadows of the grave. Apart from the division between those who have and have not the right to sleep in consecrated earth, certain areas are allotted to London parishes, or to communities such as the London Bakers, the Foresters’ Society, etc., so that the associations of life are not lost in death; there is an “Actors’ Acre,” as well as an “Oddfellows Acre,” also a last common bivouac for the Chelsea Pensioners and the corps of Commissionaires; fellow-countrymen, too, can lie side by side, and fellow-believers of many a creed: a notable feature, for instance, is the Parsees’ resting-place, so far from their Eastern Towers of Silence. The Company has its own railway station in London, from which special funeral trains convey their mournful freight into the cemetery, all arrangements being carried out with as much reverence as is consistent with the conditions of crowded city life.

About a quarter of a century ago these conditions called forth a movement which will be remembered with respect by future generations. This was the founding of the Cremation Society, and the building of the first British Crematorium near Woking, that, after a delay of doubt and difficulty as to the law, has been in use since 1885 for carrying out in an hour or so, with due decency and complete safety to the living, those chemical processes which, sooner or later, nature will work on us all, however we seek to hinder her slow operation. The late Mr. J. N. Tata, that beneficent Parsee millionaire who was not so rich in rupees as in culture and enlightenment, confessed to me that he looked forward with horror to the vulture burial of his creed, but that he would not indulge his own preference for cremation on account of paining his wife’s feelings. After all, she died a few weeks before his useful life ended, in Europe, and, as it chanced, he came to be buried at Brookwood. Some of the more enlightened of his community, I hear, are considering the question of substituting cremation for their repulsive form of sepulture. Devout Parsees have looked on fire as too sacred for such an office; but the objection of Christians is merely an ignorant prejudice, kept warm by the ashes of mediæval eschatology. The sentiment twining about a quiet country churchyard finds less deep root in a close-packed metropolitan cemetery, haunted by the hideous vulgarity of the undertaker’s art; yet even here thrives a superstition of half-savage regard for that part of us that yesterday made the tissues of a pig or an onion, and to-morrow may be passing into the meanest forms of life. A more truly Christian doctrine would inspire us to take care that our farewell to earth might surely do no harm to any fellow-man.

That prejudice has been so far broken down that several other Crematoriums are now open over the country, two close to London, welcomed by the Cremation Society as taking away much of its business, one by no means worked on commercial principles. In the course of twenty years, over twenty-five hundred bodies were consumed at Woking, many of them names of eminence: travellers like Sir Samuel Baker and Sir Henry Layard; physicians like Sir Benjamin Richardson and Sir Spencer Wells; authors like George Macdonald and W. E. Henley, Eliza Lynn Linton and “Edna Lyall”; artists like Watts and Burne-Jones; philanthropists like Sir Isaac Pitman and Dr. Barnardo; clergymen like H. R. Haweis and Brooke Lambert, all concerned in their last dispositions to set such a good example. Two dukes have been cremated here, with a due proportion of duchesses and other members of the peerage; a judge or two can be counted; and a crowning triumph of the Society would be to get a bishop among its clients. At the outset of the movement one bishop came forward to denounce it, but he was put to silence by a reminder how certain distinguished prelates had been cremated alive, so far back as Queen Mary’s time, with no presumable damage to their souls’ welfare.

As an original supporter of an enterprise that never sought to make money, I need not shrink from giving it bold advertisement. The one valid objection to cremation, that death by poisoning might be undetected, is obviated by the precautions all along insisted upon by the Cremation Society, which, along with its own aims, has advocated such more stringent examination into the cause of death as itself requires in every case. The proceedings are facilitated when, in lifetime, one has expressed a disposition for this kind of funeral. The cost of cremation has now been reduced to a few pounds, becoming lowered as the apparatus was more often used. The Golder’s Green Crematorium has almost extinguished the Society’s, which stands below the Knap Hill Barracks, and above the canal bank, a mile or two out of Woking, just beyond the church of St. John’s Hill. The building includes a chapel, where any religious service desired may be held, this and the final disposal of the remains being left to the friends of the deceased. The body, shrivelled up by a blast of hot air, is turned into a small handful of ashes, which can be preserved in an urn or buried in the ground, when its life is scattered through this world in the undying good or evil a man has helped to do. The Crematorium enclosure has a close-packed show of tiny tombstones and dwarf crosses, that give a strange effect, as of a dolls’ cemetery, so inveterate is the desire for some visible memorial of our loved ones. For my part, I should wish what is not my real self to be thrown out on any of the breezy commons about Woking—

All this fair country has been used for sepulchres since, above the heaths trodden by funeral processions and cheerful warriors of our day, were heaped tumuli where long-forgotten chiefs “quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests.” The neighbourhood has some notable recent graves, besides those in the great gathering. Over the common to the west of Brookwood Cemetery is reached Pirbright, where, near the east end of the churchyard, Henry Stanley lies at rest beneath a huge block of rough stone, an appropriate monument for him whom the natives styled “stone-breaker,” in admiration of his masterful dealing with difficulties. At Frimley, on the Surrey border, is buried Bret Harte. A little to the south of this, beside Farnborough station, on a wooded hill rises a far-seen dome, miniature of that which covers the great Napoleon at Paris, this one crowning a Benedictine Abbey built to enshrine the tombs of Louis Napoleon and his ill-fated son. On the other side of the line is the home of the Empress who, one might think, had little reason to love sights that should sorrowfully remind her how many a French mother’s son may have been spared through her untimely loss. Yet here this bereaved exile was neighbour to our chief national manufactory of martial death.

To reach Aldershot Camp, one crosses the Blackwater, the parting of Surrey and Hants, where the last great English prize-fight was fought between Sayers and Heenan on a meadow chosen for convenience of dodging either county’s police. The quarters extend for miles about the high-road running on from Farnborough station to Farnham, the North and South Camps being divided by the transverse line of the Canal. The bulk of the Camp is on Hampshire ground, but its ranges shoot into Surrey, where, on the Fox Hills or the Romping Downs, peaceably-minded strangers may be challenged by Roderick Dhus in khaki starting from copse and heath, or find themselves beset by the invisible rattle of skirmishers practising the game of war. Across a projecting tongue of Hants we come back into Surrey again; anyhow, it is not straying far from our theme to take a glance at this great military station.

Aldershot Camp, dating from after the Crimean War, has grown so much in half a century that it now sends out suckers to spring up on more remote commons, like those of Longmoor and Borden towards Selborne, where the soldier is understood to pine, exiled from the joys of Aldershot. His officers are not always much in love with the main camp, if one may judge from military novels like Lockhart’s Doubles and Quits; I have heard subalterns wofully grumbling that they had nothing to do here but work, while their seniors profess to be reminded of Aden rather than of Eden. Of Aldershot as it was in earlier days, we get lively sketches in Mrs. Ewing’s Story of a Short Life, this author having been familiar with the place before lines of barracks had replaced the huts, “like toy boxes of wooden soldiers,” in which it seemed not easy to “put your pretty soldiers away at night when you had done playing with them, and get the lid to shut down.” In that touching story she tells us at what a cost Asholt Camp was constructed.

Before the Crimean War, this obscure parish had only a few hundred people. The little church above Aldershot station betrays what a small place it originally was that has grown into a large town, its streets alive and alert with the varied uniforms of Mr. T. Atkins, some dozen or score thousand of him in ordinary times. The High Street, like certain more famous thoroughfares, has only one side, facing to the blocks of building and parade grounds of the South Camp on a ridge above the canal. The busier side streets bear such appropriate names as Union, Wellington, Victoria, while the blocks of soldiers’ quarters are inspiringly dubbed Corunna, Talavera, and so forth; and other names of military fame mark the Lines stretching over the canal to the North Camp, which has a station and “bazaar” quarter of its own. On very hot days, indeed, one might mistake parts of the camp for an Indian cantonment, till the eye catches ragged firs bordering this dusty maidan. The Cavalry lie to the west, beside the Winchester high-road, which is a boundary of the permanent barracks, while beyond it summer brings out mushroom-beds of tents for the volunteers and militia temporarily under training. On this side, to the south, opens the Long Valley, haunted by shadows of dust, where the Royal Pavilion makes a station for the Sovereign reviewing the troops in that “awful Campus Martius.” On a knoll in a hollow hereabouts has been hidden the statue of the Great Duke that was laughed off its old perch on the arch at Hyde Park Corner. Farther south, on the right of the high-road, stands out Hungry Hill, and beyond it the bluff called Cæsar’s Camp, from which at a height of 600 feet there is a wide view northwards. Cæsar has other doubtful camps in Surrey, whose border is recrossed on these heights. Hence, by a hedge of public-houses with which Hale tempts the British Grenadier, or through the quiet shades of the Episcopal park, we come down to the hop grounds of Farnham, and across the Wey’s gault beds may gain that other series of commons about Hindhead.

All along this western side of the county sand has been mainly in evidence. Where we cross the chalk, between Aldershot and Farnham, its ridge is so much narrowed and lowered as not to force itself on the notice of unspectacled eyes. This is exceptional, for elsewhere in Surrey nature lays her record open, plain to read, leaf after leaf, only here and there a little crumpled and dog’s-eared at corners by the careless hands of time. So we can see clearly on our next transverse section, made nearer the eastern border.

X

THE BRIGHTON ROADS

ALL the main roads running southwards from London would lead with more or less of a circumbendibus to Brighton; and the ideal way for a leisurely traveller might be to pass from one to another on short cross-roads, so as to pick out the best stretches of each. In Paterson’s road-book (1792) the Brighthelmston Road is indicated as going by Croydon, Godstone Green, East Grinstead and Lewes, fifty-nine miles, with a short-cut beyond Godstone by Lindfield, saving seven miles; but it also gives the “New Road” by Sutton, Reigate, and Crawley, fifty-four miles. A newer road by Croydon and Redhill, joining the Reigate route at Povey Cross, so as to save a mile or so, came in our time to bear the name of the Brighton Road par excellence, and was preferred by coaches and cycles, till the crush of Croydon traffic and tramways

drove them back to the Sutton route, even at the cost of facing the steep windings of Reigate Hill.

This road through Sutton and Reigate seems to have been the standard one when the Prince Regent’s patronage made Brighton’s fortune. The lumbering stages of older days took a whole long day to go all the way round by Lewes; but early in the century lighter vehicles began to ply on a shorter route, their wheels soon greased by competition. Among the many faults Cobbett has to find with George IV.’s reign, one is that “great parcels of stock jobbers” live at Brighton with their families, who “skip backwards and forwards on the coaches” to business in the City. He speaks of at least twenty coaches running daily on three or four routes, by which the Brighton resident, “leaving not very early in the morning, reaches London by noon, and starting back two and a half hours after, reaches Brighton not very late at night.” If 7 A.M. would answer to this matutinal worthy’s idea of a not very early start, that allows five hours for a journey recorded to be done once, under William IV., in the exceptionally short time of three hours forty minutes. A more precise writer of Cobbett’s date gives six hours as a good rate for sixteen regular coaches plying all the year—besides eight “butterflies” in summer—the “Times,” the “Regulator,” the “Rocket,” the “Patriot,” the “True Blue,” and so forth. In our own day of coaching revival a record run has been a little under eight hours to Brighton and back, with the disadvantage of more thronged thoroughfares to be traversed at either end. The cyclists’ record seems to be about seven hours for the double journey, which is only a little more than that of an amateur Dick Turpin on horseback. The famous Stock Exchange walk to Brighton was won in nine and a half hours. One can hardly say in what time the motor-car could devour this way, if it got a fair chance and a clear road, as the rail has for its rush of an hour or so. One of the latest appearances on the Brighton road has been a motor omnibus, that modestly professed to take four hours to Brighton. For some time the Post Office has been carrying its heavy traffic this way by a motor vehicle, which once encountered the old-fashioned peril of highway robbery. There has been talk of a special road from London to Brighton, reserved as a track on which such careering vehicles may consume their own dust at their own pace.

The Sutton route is certainly the best in that it soonest brings one out into something like open country. Once clear of tram lines at Tooting or Streatham, roads from the west end and the city converge by Figgs Marsh on the flats of Mitcham. This is a widely straggling sucker of the metropolis which clings to relics of its rustic character, showing clumps of cottages, old inns, and patches of open ground not yet squeezed out of existence, while it has a fame of its own for the manufacture of tobacco and for the culture of aromatic herbs, that are distilled at Carshalton not far off. About several villages around, indeed, the air is perfumed by crops of lavender and peppermint, the essence of which makes an export to France. This neighbourhood had also an old name for walnuts, as mentioned by Fuller; and it still has room for gardens as well as golf ground. Let us trust that only scandal-mongering jealousy prompted a reproach once current among its neighbours:—

It may be that Mitcham got this bad reputation through the gypsies that long hung about it, and other undesirable aliens who gathered to the revels of Mitcham Fair.

Outside of Mitcham, when the road has passed a very pleasant glimpse of the Wandle, it becomes truly rural, running for two or three miles by hedges, trees, and park palings, with as yet few hints of suburban expansion. Yet, truth to tell, this is but a commonplace prospect of Surrey; and the cyclist or pedestrian might do well to make a bend by the left for a more varied route, by Mitcham Common, Hackbridge, and Carshalton, with its old Church and the pond wept over by Ruskin, who would have mourned more loudly had he lived to see its well-timbered park invaded by the builder. Carshalton—spelt Casehorton in Georgian books, Cash-Haulton by Fuller—is one of those places that has a wilful pronunciation of its name, this and the spelling perhaps worn down from Cross Old Town; and it is old enough to figure in King Alfred’s will. Eastwards, by Wallington and Beddington, this choice place of residence almost runs into Croydon, to which a pretty walk may be taken by the bank of the Wandle opposite Beddington Park, where the stately Hall of the Carews, that has entertained Queen Elizabeth, is now an Orphan Asylum, and may be visited on week-day afternoons. In the gardens here it is said that oranges were acclimatised for a century, till an unusually severe frost proved too much for them. The spirit of the nineteenth century turned part of Beddington Park into a sewage farm; but still this vicinity has some pretty peeps not yet blocked out by bricks and mortar.

Even in George I.’s time, Defoe tells us, the edge of the Downs hereabouts, as “the most agreeable spot on all this side of London,” was thickly set with citizens’ houses, some “built with such a Profusion of Expense that they look rather like Seats of the Nobility.” In our day, the merits of a high and dry site have spread building farther on to the chalk heights. Coming by Carshalton, one strikes Sutton in its centre, where beside the railway station the road, till not long ago, was spanned by the sign of the “Cock,” that held out longer than the turnpike gate below it. The high-road runs right through this long place, for two miles or so, first descending then ascending on the chalk slopes, where so many Londoners seek healthy homes that this must be the largest of our scores of South towns, one of the commonest place-names in England. Newtown is still more frequent, and not far behind Sutton comes Weston, whereas Nortons and Eastons appear comparatively rare.

The Sutton of Surrey seems more prosperous than picturesque, its old features overlaid, and its parish monuments packed away into a handsome new Church. But a mile to the west, Cheam has more rural features scattered round a spire below which stands the chancel of the old Church, enshrining some stately monuments; then from this village one can walk on through Nonsuch Park to Ewell on the Epsom road. Cheam is perhaps best known by what seems the oldest private school in England, now a nursery for Eton, but it has passed through various phases, and was at one time kept by the Rev. William Gilpin, whose search for the picturesque came to be caricatured in the tours of Dr. Syntax.

Having cleared the Sutton villadom, about the twelfth milestone from Westminster once more we emerge into the open; yet for a time the green Downs are cumbered by huge institutions, a lunatic asylum, and other blocks of building till lately used as Metropolitan Union schools, whose pupils made an advertisement for Sutton’s salubrity; but one hears that they are now to be devoted to the care of more afflicted wards of our local government. Beyond, on the right, is seen the outlying place called Belmont, that hardly justifies its name. The unshackled wayfarer might bear over the Downs to the left, making for the spire of the pretty village of Banstead, hidden among fine trees. Those who keep the high-road must not forget to turn round, near the crossing of the Epsom Downs line, for a view from the highest point, over 500 feet, looking across the southern suburbs to the dome of St. Paul’s, that may be seen on a clear day, and sometimes, it is said, the eye catches Windsor Castle to the west. Closer at hand are scenes that moved an eighteenth-century poet:—

Here we are fairly on Banstead Downs, stretching to the Epsom racecourse, that seems to have originally come under Banstead’s name. Epsom town lies two or three miles to our right, beyond Nork Park. To the left, on the north side of the Downs, is the park called the “Oaks,” seat of that Lord Derby who founded the race so named. On either side there are alluring byways, like that leading by Banstead along the ridge to Woodmansterne, at whose little Church guide-posts set us on the way back to Carshalton, or into the Chipstead valley, where we might turn down to Purley, or up the valley to regain the high-road at Tadworth by a very pleasant path through Banstead woods and over Burgh Heath.

At Tadworth, where the Chipstead valley line to Tottenham Corner is crossed, the high-road forks, its right branch going to Dorking, its left to Reigate by the spire of Kingswood Church. The Dorking road runs over Banstead Heath and Walton Heath, where, at the height of nearly 600 feet, stands up Walton-on-the-Hill, so called in distinction from Walton low-lying on the Thames. Here there is a wide stretch of real stubbly heath, such as Cobbett would abuse as “villainous,” but the Romans had not such bad taste, who left the remains of a considerable villa to be unearthed on it. Walton Place is said to have been the retreat of Anne of Cleves after her lucky separation from the royal Bluebeard. In our day Walton is perhaps best famed for its excellent golf links. The whole district is a charming jumble of fields and woods among pitted sandhills and wrinkled chalk ridges, where a pedestrian will often be tempted to stray from the open road. A mile or so to the west of Walton,

over a wooded hollow, is reached the conspicuous Church of Headley-on-the-Hill, already mentioned as goal of so many footpaths. From this may soon be gained the Roman Road; and southwards, from Walton or Headley, there are pleasant tracks leading to the edge of the Downs to strike the Pilgrims’ Way as it comes to pass above Reigate.

These heaths are skirted by our Brighton highway, which at Gatton Park, about three miles beyond the fork at Tadworth, approaches its grandest point. Through the cutting to lower its level, that gave such strange offence to Cobbett, it suddenly emerges on the steep brow above Reigate, passing under the Suspension Bridge of the Pilgrims’ Way, whence on the left a most leafy lane leads down to Redhill, the modern annexe of Reigate. A footpath runs along the cutting to the end of the Suspension Bridge, where are seats for enjoying the celebrated view from this brow; but from the open turf by the roadside the prospect is hardly diminished, embracing the whole south of the county. The Holmesdale Valley lies at our feet, with Reigate spread out in the foreground, backed by the sand ridge; far away to the east stretches the Weald of Kent; and the towers of East Grinstead stand up to the south-east, across the Sussex border, with Crowborough Beacon beyond. Chanctonbury Ring and the Devil’s Dyke on the Sussex Downs can sometimes be made out to the south. To the west, the Holmesdale Valley is continued between Leith Hill and the Chalk Downs on which we stand; then on that hand the featureless ridge of Hindhead will close the view in fine weather.

The descent to Reigate requires caution, imposed on prudent wheels by its steep turns, and on imprudent ones by the fame of the local police, who have made themselves a terror to scorchers. In the valley, beyond the railway station, the road pierces into the heart of Reigate by the unusual feature of a tunnel beneath the hillock on which stand its Castle ruins and the brand-new block of Municipal Buildings.

Reigate, now so disguised in villas and wooded grounds, and so swollen by the railway growth of Redhill on its east side, is no mere mushroom-bed of London homes, but an old chief town of south-eastern Surrey. Here was built a Norman Castle of the De Warennes, a rival to that of Bletchingley on the sand ridge beyond Redhill. Till the last Reform Bill Reigate had a member of its own, and two in olden days. When membership of Parliament was often felt a burden rather than a privilege, this neighbourhood was but too well represented, Gatton on the Downs above being one of the most notorious rotten boroughs, and Bletchingley another, that made a phosphorescent end with Lord Palmerston as its member.

The nucleus of the place is marked by a gathering of old inns and shops about the cross-roads, above which the site of the Castle has been laid out as a public garden. There is not much of the structure left, the chief sight being the sandstone caves underneath, which tradition, or perhaps no better authority than Tupper’s novel, Stephen Langton, makes the secret meeting-place of the barons conspiring to bring King John on his knees for the signing of Magna Charta. Still older legends haunt these caves, where rude carvings have been attributed to Roman soldiers quartered in them. Under other houses in or about the town there are caves or excavations said to be better worth seeing, but not always open to idle curiosity, one of them, indeed, being used for a rifle gallery. What will be apparent to the passer-by is a pleasant mixture of lawns, gardens, and clumps of fine foliage, among which footpaths lead one in view of these private amenities well displayed on the swells of the valley.

Reigate, then, may prove a spot to “delay the tourist,” certainly for the charms of its situation between the varied features of chalk and sand closely facing each other from either side. On the north a steep ascent leads to the celebrated Beechwood view, from which one may wander along the timbered Downs to Box Hill. Up the valley runs the road to Dorking, going out by Reigate Heath, where on a byway to Leigh is found the curious feature of a windmill turned into a little church. Beyond the town the sand ridge leads eastward to the broken expanse of Earlswood Common; on the west side of the road it is crowned by the clumps and knolls of Reigate Park, open to the public for striking prospects both north and south; and from this enclosure one may hold on along the heights to come upon the Mole winding through one of the most Surreyish corners of Surrey.

The Brighton road mounts straight up the sand hill, deeply cut under the edge of Reigate Park, below which the old Augustinian Priory has been transformed into a mansion, whose late owner, Lady Henry Somerset, made herself a high name both in England and America as a temperance reformer. By path to Redhill along the top of the ridge, or over Earlswood Common on its south side, one can now in a couple of miles strike across to the road through Croydon, soon to converge with that we have followed through Reigate. From Woodhatch, the latter drops on to the Weald, in four miles joining the other road at Povey Cross, twenty-six miles from London. A mile or so more brings us to the edge of Surrey, guarded by a “White Lion,” but no longer marked by the “County Oak,” whose time-seasoned timber has gone to make the screen of Ifield Church.

Henceforth this much travelled road belongs to Sussex. The last stretch of it in Surrey is not its most attractive part, from which, however, one could make a fine diversion among the branches of the Mole to the west, crossing over to the line of Stone Street. But our theme is the Brighton road, on which let us now skim backwards along the main branch viâ Croydon, that, more closely accompanying the Brighton rail, might be chosen by wayfarers bent on business or record-making.

Behind the convergence, this branch leads by the racecourse of Gatwick, then, across the Mole, by the new growth of Horley, that might be called the southernmost of London’s dependencies, if the same thing were not to be said of Brighton; but the old yews by the Church, and the “Chequers” and “Six Bells” inns speak for Horley’s unvillaed antiquity. To carry out the sporting character of the neighbourhood, Horley is headquarters of the Surrey staghounds, and at Burstow, to the east, are the kennels of one of three packs of foxhounds that hunt this edge of the county, where Mr. Jorrocks must have had many a day before he came to his mastership at Handley Spa. To the east here extends a part of the Weald little famed in the tourist world, yet containing such points as Burstow with its monument to Flamsteed, our first Astronomer-Royal; Thunderfield Castle, taken to have been a Saxon fortress; and the old mansion of Smallfield Place, by which the free foot or wheel might wander across to the East Grinstead road.

On the Brighton road itself—where the reader must bear in mind that his head has been turned Londonwards—he finds not much of interest till it comes to switchback over Earlswood Common, between an artificial lake and the palace of the idiot asylum. Thus it mounts the sand ridge, stretching towards Reigate in boldly broken scars and tangled hollows of the red sandstone that gives Redhill its name, here crowned by a circular clump to commemorate the Jubilee of 1897. On the other side this range invites a fine diversion, by either low or high roads, past Nutfield and Bletchingley to Godstone, on whose Green can be joined the road going southwards by Caterham.

Our business-like highway has now nothing for it but a long down and up through the main street of Redhill, in the central depression passing the big Junction and St. Ann’s Schools on the right, where, on the other side, the excrescence of Warwick Town has grown along the cross-road almost into Reigate. When the high-road gets out of Redhill, it is climbing the Downs, reached at Merstham below Gatton Park, and passed by a valley making the course of the Bourne, one of those English wadys so common in chalk countries, which, filled by the overflowing of some subterranean reservoir, may burst out in ravaging floods, as this one has often done. In the same hollow pass is pent up the railway that was apt to be choked by the trains of two lines, till the Brighton Company relieved the pressure by a new conduit from Earlswood to Purley.

The road through Croydon falls into Smitham Bottom, brightened for Londoners by such names as Stoat’s Nest and Hooley Farm, but overshadowed by the great County Asylum on Cane’s Hill, and the buildings that have sprung up about it. By Cane’s Hill opens the Chipstead valley, running up to Kingswood and Walton Heath. On the other side rises the smooth swell of the Farthing or Fairdene Downs, which, with Coulsdon Common beyond, are a pleasure-ground of the City of London, as seems too little known to Londoners, unless it be the Guardsmen from Coulsdon Barracks, whose uniforms may appear as showy dots on the turf slopes, where sometimes hardly a human figure comes in sight over a mile of open prospect. Yet few finer rambles can be found so near London than by mounting from Coulsdon station to the bare top of this ridge, and keeping straight along, to hold on by a woodland lane for Chaldon and the brow of the Downs, with more than one rough path dropping off into the hollow on the left to straggle up again to Coulsdon Common and towards Caterham.

But our road, as Mrs. Gamp philosophically remarks, being born in a vale, must take the consequences of such a situation. It leads us humbly on to the violent outbreak of new houses about Purley, looked down on by the Reedham

Orphanage to the right and the Warehousemen’s and Clerks’ School on Russell Hill to the left. Guide-books remind us how here Horne Tooke wrote his Diversions of Purley; but contemporary Radicals seem not much disposed to seek either amusement or instruction from the works of that philosophic grammarian and agitator. What will interest the present generation more is an effort to preserve Purley Beeches, a fine woodland on the Downs, as pleasure-ground for this fast-growing suburb.

On the east, beyond the railway, beside a face of quarried chalk, opens the Caterham valley, its hollow and its south side much choked up with streets and mansions, strung together by two railway lines; but the north slope opens in the steeps of Riddlesdown, where a thousand acres are preserved as a London park, with tea-gardens and other attractions much in favour with school-treat parties; and in the background, by a path to Warlingham, may perhaps be found a strong encampment of gypsies. The last time I passed that way, on a fine Sunday evening, I came upon a band of “burly chiels and clever hizzies” from the North, actually dancing about a piper—“to give them music was his charge,” as more rigid Scots might quote grimly. The waters by which these cheerful exiles thus forgot the Sabbath songs of their Zion show, in the reservoirs of Kenley and Purley, a strikingly blue tint one guesses to be due to some process for softening their chalky impregnation; and this valley also has a subterranean bourne, to which fond tradition gives a periodicity of seven years. Again a word to the unshackled wanderer: let him pass up by the curving face of Riddlesdown and through the lower part of Caterham, past the Congregational College, then by a track up the Harestone valley, leading to a high brow of the Downs at the War Coppice. The Caterham valley itself is some hundreds of feet above the sea, so no wonder that so many well-to-do Londoners make their nests about what a local guide styles “its cluster of ambrosial hills.”

At Purley begins the long tram line that takes us through Croydon, and on to Norbury by still open spaces, shrinking like Balzac’s Peau de chagrin, where the footpaths that run off to the heights of Norwood may any year be found hedged by houses. Croydon ought to be well equipped with trams, for one of the first in the country was made hence to Wandsworth, the very first, in 1800, belonging to Derbyshire, the contrivance of Benjamin Outram, from whose name Outramways is said to have been playfully derived; but the word tram is of course an old one. There is now only one hiatus, at Streatham, in the electric tram route from the Chalk Downs to the Thames bridges; and that seems like to be bridged over, for Croydon is running into London as fast as its own satellites, Purley, Sanderstead, Thornton Heath, and Beddington are drawn into the growing mass of Croydon.

Croydon has some right to resent its threatened absorption into the metropolis, for, as populous as London was three centuries ago, it is by far the largest independent municipality in Surrey. It was a town of high antiquity, and a main seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury in days when those prelates had a dozen palaces in their diocese. The “Colliers of Croydon” were once well known as burning charcoal in the woods around. Then the town lay mainly to the west of the present main thoroughfare, on low ground about the head-waters of the Wandle. This part has been swept and garnished in our day; and with other old taverns has gone the “King’s Head,” kept by Ruskin’s grandmother. But Croydon has still relics of the past among its smart modern features displayed by electric light round the tower of its Town Hall. At the corner where the chief street is gained from the Central station stands Whitgift’s Hospital, a “haunt of ancient peace” since it was founded by Elizabeth’s archbishop; but it is now threatened with removal or alteration as standing too much in the way of the busy tram line, that seems already to have pushed the Brighton coaches off this road, where Croydon’s “Greyhound” was once a well-known stage. From the crossing at Whitgift’s Hospital, Church Street leads down to Croydon Church, destroyed by fire forty years ago, but reproduced by Sir Gilbert Scott, and containing some of the old monuments saved from that disaster. Close to it may be seen the remains of the Archbishops’ Palace, in part preserved and restored, now, after being turned to base offices, used as an orphanage school under care of the Kilburn Sisters. It is said to have been founded by Lanfranc, and was occupied by a long line of prelates up to George II.’s time.

When this palace was sold in 1780, the proceeds were used to buy Addington Park, on the heights to the east, which became the Archbishops’ country seat till it in turn came to be sold and replaced by a mansion at Canterbury in our time. The park, several miles in circuit, shows a beautiful contrast of fir-woods and heath, recalling Scotland, with the softer features of an English demesne; so one hoped for it to escape the fate of being broken up for building lots, as seems now the doom of its seclusion. But the Addington Hills on the Croydon side, and the bare brow of Shirley, are open, giving a wide view over South London, with the Crystal Palace in the foreground upon the edge of Kent. Into a pretty corner of this county we soon pass by a conspicuous windmill and the high built spire of Shirley Church, outside which, at the east end, may be seen the tomb of Ruskin’s parents, with a characteristic inscription. Kent is entered a mile farther on, at West Wickham.

This is not the only fine point of view about Croydon. Just outside of the town, to the south-east, above Selsdon Road station, the high wooded bank called Crohamhurst is now a public park, about which pleasant footways lead over a country too rapidly being built over. On the other side, beyond the Duppas Hill Park, the Wandle is our guide to half-rural scenes of Waddon and Beddington, already mentioned as we passed by Mitcham.

The main road runs Croydon into Purley, passing the aerodrome station for Paris. A fork of it is the oldest Brighton Road, which leaves the county below East Grinstead. From Croydon it goes by Caterham, dropping through a hollow in the Downs to Godstone Green, with its good old inns, then by Tilburstow Hill, a bold knob of the sand ridge, on to a stretch of the Weald, from which once more it rises to the Forest Ridge of Sussex. But we have already crossed this road at its best points; and fresh scenes will be opened out by taking a more devious line a little to the east, on which articulate guide-posts and more or less articulate men may be consulted to keep one in touch with straighter roads to Brighton.

From the main road, this line diverges by a fork to the left at the “Red Deer,” no longer the south terminus of Croydon trams. Past spreading suburbs it mounts up to Sanderstead, whose pretty Church stands at a height of 500 feet upon a sandy patch, from which our road soon passes on to the chalk tableland. An hour’s sharp walk would bring us to Warlingham above the Caterham valley, where the Church, with its ancient yews, has among other old features a faded fresco of St. Christopher. A mile or two farther on, the chalk is broken by gravel pits and traces of ancient excavation on Worms Heath; then the road rises to 800 feet on Nore Hill, and still higher as by Botley Hill, the unpretending Mount Blanc of the Surrey Downs, about seven miles beyond Croydon, it reaches the sharp drop to Titsey, on the brow where five roads meet, between Tatsfield to the left and Woldingham to the right. This is the point we gained in passing along the edge of the Downs by Harden Park, above the Pilgrims’ Way.

On such a descent the cyclist needs no notice boards as warning to caution. The pedestrian may leave the careful course of the high-road for the steep chalky lane on the right, plunging straight down beside the woods of Titsey Park. Either road brings him by Titsey, across the line of the Pilgrims’ Way, to Limpsfield, a scattered village lying prettily against the farther slope, where the common makes a favourite golf ground. Village is hardly the word for what seems a roomy suburb, spreading itself on the broken ground that has given fine sites for such institutions as the Church Missionary Home and the Caxton Convalescent Home for printers; but here is well shown that scene so frequent around London, a quiet roadside Church and core of old houses beginning to be lost among rows of new ones, even as in many a Surrey graveyard the heavy, flat, weather-worn slabs, under which “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” are now thrown into shade by a thickening display of choicer and fresher memorials that mark the passing of a more æsthetic generation to its last home.

Here one might turn aside on either hand through fine country. Near the station, shared by Limpsfield with Oxted, to the west of it stands the Church of the latter village, looking up to the Downs, which may be ascended by steep ways. A little beyond this Church is Barrow Green, the summer home of Jeremy Bentham, where he entertained James Mill and his well-taught son. By Oxted, an hour or so’s walk leads westward to Godstone, past or not far from Tandridge and Godstone Churches, both finely restored by Sir Gilbert Scott, who lived here under the brow of Marden Park. His alabaster monument to his wife in Tandridge churchyard, and the view from its ancient yew, are worth a slight bend to the south, bringing one in the latitude of Tilburstow Hill, that rises between Godstone Green and its far-off station; then along that sand ridge one might keep on for half a dozen miles to Redhill. There is a still finer walk to the east of Limpsfield, across