from his straight way. But, first, he would do well to stop at Hillingdon Church, a spaciously handsome one, containing brasses and monuments, conspicuous among them the Onslow and Paget tombs on either side of the altar. In the churchyard is the tomb of Rich, the celebrated harlequin and lessee of Covent Garden.
Hillingdon was the mother church of Uxbridge, whose long main street is sentinelled, a mile further on, by the tall modern spire of St. Andrew’s; then, further along, the older Parish Church stands hidden behind the Market Hall, so closely squeezed into the same block of building that there is no room for a chancel. This border borough, thriving on corn-mills and other industries, has more the look of an independent market town than any in Middlesex. Till lately a certain awkwardness of communications kept Uxbridge rather out of the way, served only by a branch from the Great Western Railway at West Drayton, as it once was by slow canal-boats; but now it has a Metropolitan line from Harrow, besides the electric tram that runs through it to the top of the descent by which the road falls to cross the Colne. The meaning of the name has been matter of controversy, but probably this bridge was christened from the Celtic word for water that appears in usk, esk, axe, uisk, whiskey, and other forms.
Uxbridge has a population of some 9,000, its thickly inhabited outskirts left out of account. The chief event in its history is the meeting here in 1645 of Commissioners appointed by Charles I. and the Parliament to negotiate terms of peace. The mansion in which their fruitless deliberations were held has been much altered, and is now an inn, but it still proudly exhibits itself as the “Treaty House” by the road at the west end of the town, and part of the interior is preserved in its old dignity. The sign of this inn was an inheritance from the “Crown,” at which the King’s Commissioners lodged, those of the Parliament finding quarters at the “George,” further back in the chief street. Beyond the “Treaty House,” first crossing the canal by a very Piscatorish-looking tavern and a large mill, we pass the Colne into Buckinghamshire.
The finest scenery about Uxbridge comes over the river in the county on which we must here turn our backs. Good Pisgah views of it can be had from the high ground of Uxbridge Common to the north of the town, by which goes out an airy road towards Rickmansworth, with branches for the quiet villages we visited from Pinner. Southwards the road by the river and the canal is not so pleasant, populated by various industries about Cowley, in whose churchyard was buried Dr. Dodd, the divine hanged for forgery, 1777. But opener and more agreeable country is reached at West Drayton, where, having passed its scattered hamlets on the canal, we find houses not so thick as good old trees about its green, and picturesque nooks by the branching swirls of the Colne. From the Church, enclosed in a park to the left, a fine avenue leads southwards, ending in paths and lanes that, by the villages of Harmondsworth or Harlington, make pleasant ways into the central western highway.
This, once renowned as the Bath Road, begins for Londoners with Piccadilly, leading by the south side of the Park to Kensington, Hammersmith, then by Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Gunnersbury to the busy end of Kew Bridge, lately rebuilt. Beyond, it enters the main street of Brentford, so narrow that one calls out at finding this thoroughfare choked with a tram-line, as it once was with flying Roundheads in a hot fight of the Civil War.