Haslemere.
Haslemere has strayed higher and higher on the slopes above the old town. The core lies round a broad street in which the White Horse faces the Swan, and the town hall stands between them, a rather dull little building, in the middle of the road. The town has kept less of the past than Farnham; perhaps it had less to keep; but it has some good red seventeenth-century houses, weather-tiled gables, and tall brick chimneys. Toadflax and arabis climb over the old garden walls: one little house looks as if its walls were held together by coils of wistaria. In another, a square, comfortable building with an elaborate doorway, lived the water-colour painter and wood engraver, Josiah Wood Whymper, father of the Whymper whom a later generation knows best as a painter of animals and game birds.
The most interesting interior in Haslemere is the museum. It was presented to the town by Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, and teaches history, geology, botany and everything to do with Haslemere's (and other) birds, beasts, and reptiles. You may study the development of the world from the birth of life perhaps thirty-one million years ago—that is the age Haslemere teaches—down to the present day. Skulls of elephants, antelopes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, gorillas and giraffes instruct the zoologist; local vipers and grass snakes curl in spirits of wine; stuffed quadrupeds, including a large kangaroo, illustrate climates foreign to Haslemere; local ornithologists contribute cases of the birds of the neighbourhood. Witley sends a case of crossbills; twenty years ago a pair of hen harriers—or are they Montagu's harriers?—were killed on Hindhead; a blackcock guards his grey hen, and was shot not far away. Are blackcock extinct in Surrey? The last Lord Midleton wrote to The Times some years ago to state his belief that they were. At Frensham I was told that the last pair were shot in 1889. But Mr. E.D. Swanton, the curator of the Haslemere Museum, learned in everything that a museum should hold, from Celtic pottery to caterpillars, told me when I was at Haslemere that he had seen a pair (I write in 1908) only two years ago. He was not at all certain that there were no more blackcocks in the county. But I fear the villas have been too much for them.
The church stands a little apart from the town, and holds two very different memorials. One is the Burne-Jones window to the memory of Tennyson, who lived at Aldworth on Black Down over the border; the other is a strange, rough heap of peat and heather, piled inside the gate of the churchyard. Under it lies John Tyndall. He was one of the discoverers of Hindhead as a place to live in instead of merely a hill to climb; the tragedy of his death is a recent memory. It was his wish that his grave should be no more than a mound of heather, but such wishes can end unhappily. If the grave is neglected, perhaps that is what he hoped it would be; but neglect, can grow into something worse. When I last saw the grave—perhaps on an unfortunate day—the heather had somehow collected newspapers and empty jampots; it looked like soon becoming a rubbish heap.
A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine visited Haslemere in 1801 and described the painted glass in the windows. One of them he catalogued thus:
"Offering of the Wise Men. Among the numerous presents, I distinguished some fine hams, poultry, and mutton."
A recent inspection fails to distinguish among the numerous presents either fine hams or mutton.
Years ago Haslemere had a lion. It was an old beech tree, twenty feet in girth, and the late Louis Jennings, in his Field Paths and Green Lanes, tells us that since Murray's Handbook spoke of a lion, he searched for it for long, and when he found it he was disappointed. To-day it is a stump, or is said to be, but nobody could show it me; I am sure I looked for it longer than Louis Jennings, but I never found it. All I found was what will perhaps some day grow into another lion—a beech tree and a holly apparently growing from the same root.
