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.