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IN PURSUIT OF SPRING

PADDINGTON CANAL.

“So far the life of men moving to and fro across the bridges was like the old life that I knew, though down below upon the sparkling waters many birds were alighting, or were already seated like wondrous blossoms upon the bulwarks of a barge painted in parrot colours red and green.”

IN PURSUIT OF
SPRING

BY
EDWARD THOMAS

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
AND NEW YORK.

TO
DOROTHY
AND
VIVIAN LOCKE ELLIS

First Published April 1914

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

From Drawings by Ernest Hazelhurst.

IN PURSUIT OF SPRING.

I.
IN SEARCH OF SPRING.

This is the record of a journey from London to the Quantock Hills—to Nether Stowey, Kilve, Crowcombe, and West Bagborough, to the high point where the Taunton-Bridgwater road tops the hills and shows all Exmoor behind, all the Mendips before, and upon the left the sea, and Wales very far off. It was a journey on or with a bicycle. The season was Easter, a March Easter. “A North-Easter, probably?” No. Nor did much north-east go to the making of it. I will give its pedigree briefly, going back only a month—that is, to the days when I began to calculate, or guess methodically, what the weather would be like at Easter.

Perhaps it was rather more than a month before Easter that a false Spring visited London. But I will go back first a little earlier, to one of those great and notable days after the turn of the year that win the heart so, without deceiving it.

The wind blew from the north-west with such peace and energy together as to call up the image of a good giant striding along with superb gestures—like those of a sower sowing. The wind blew and the sun shone over London. A myriad roofs laughed together in the light. The smoke and the flags, yellow and blue and white, waved tumultuously, straining for joy to leave the chimneys and the flagstaffs, like hounds sighting their quarry. The ranges of cloud bathing their lower slopes in the brown mist of the horizon had the majesty of great hills, the coolness and sweetness and whiteness of the foam on the crests of the crystal fountains, and they were burning with light. The clouds did honour to the city, which they encircled as with heavenly ramparts. The stone towers and spires were soft, and luminous as old porcelain. There was no substance to be seen that was not made precious by the strong wind and the light divine. All was newly built to a great idea. The flags were waving to salute the festal opening of the gates in those white walls to a people that should presently surge in and onward to take possession. Princely was to be the life that had this amphitheatre of clouds and palaces for its display.

Of human things, only music—if human it can be called—was fit to match this joyousness and this stateliness. What, I thought, if the pomp of river and roof and cloudy mountain walls of the world be made ready, as so often they had been before, only for the joy of the invisible gods? For who has not known a day when some notable festival is manifestly celebrated by a most rare nobleness in the ways of the clouds, the colours of the woods, the glitter of the waters, yet on earth all has been as it was wont to be?

So far, the life of men moving to and fro across the bridges was like the old life that I knew, though, down below, upon the sparkling waters many birds were alighting, or were already seated like wondrous blossoms upon the bulwarks of a barge painted in parrot colours—red and green. When would the entry begin?

In the streets, for the present, the roar continued of the inhuman masses of humanity, amidst which a child’s crying for a toy was an impertinence, a terrible pretty interruption of the violent moving swoon. Between the millions and the one no agreement was visible. The wind summoned the colour in a girl’s cheeks. There, one smiled with inward bliss. Another talked serenely with lovely soft mouth and wide eyes that saw only one other pair as the man next her bent his head nearer. The wind wagged the tails of blue or brown fur about the forms of luxurious tall women, and poured wine into their bodies, so that their complexions glowed under their violet hats. But in one moment the passing loveliness of spirit, or form, or gesture, sank and was drowned in the oceanic multitude. A boy had just met his father at a railway station, and was glad; he held the man’s hand, and was trotting gently, trying to get him to run—he failed: then in delight put his arm to his father’s waist and was carried along thus, half lifted from the ground, for several yards, smiling and chattering like a bird on a waving branch. The two obstructed others, who took a step to left or right in disdain or impatience. Only a child at an alley entrance saw and laughed, wishing she were his sister, and had his father. A moment, and these also were swallowed up.

I came to broader pavements. Here was less haste; and women went in and out of the crowd, not only parallel to the street, but crosswise here and there; and a man could go at any pace, not of necessity the crowd’s. Some of the most beautiful civilized women of the world moved slowly and musically in an intricate pattern, which any one could watch freely; they had a background of lustrous jewellery, metal-work and glass, gorgeous cloths and silks, and many had a foil in the stiff black and white male figures beside them. They moved without fear. Stately, costly, tender, beautiful, nevertheless, though so near, they were seen as in a magic crystal that enshrines the remote and the long dead. They walked as in dream, regardlessly smiling. They cast their proud or kind eyes hither and thither. Once in the intense light of a jeweller’s shop, spangled with pearls, diamonds, and gold, a large red hand, cold and not quite clean, appeared from within, holding in three fearful, careful fingers a brooch of gold and diamonds, which it placed among the others, and then withdrew itself slowly, tremulously, lest it should work harm to those dazzling cressets. The eyes of the women watched the brooch: the red hand need not have been so fearful; it was unseen—the soul was hid. Straight through the women, in the middle of the broad pavement, and very slowly, went an old man. He was short, and his patched overcoat fell in a parallelogram from his shoulders almost to the pavement. From underneath his little cap massive gray curls sprouted and spread over his upturned collar. Just below the fringe of his coat his bare heels glowed red. His hands rested deep in his pockets. His face was almost concealed by curls and collar: all that showed itself was the glazed cold red of his cheeks and large, straight nose, and the glitter of gray eyes that looked neither to left nor to right, but ahead and somewhat down. Not a sound did he make, save the flap of rotten leather against feet which he scarcely raised lest the shoes should fall off. Doubtless the composer of the harmonies of this day could have made use of the old man—doubtless he did; but as it was a feast day of the gods, not of men, I did not understand. Around this figure, clad in complete hue of poverty, the dance of women in violet and black, cinnamon and green, tawny and gray, scarlet and slate, and the browns and golden browns of animals’ fur, wove itself fantastically. The dance heeded him not, nor he the dance. The sun shone bright. The wind blew and waved the smoke and the flags wildly against the sky. The horses curved their stout necks, showing their teeth, trampling, massing head by head in rank and cluster, a frieze as magnificent as the procession of white clouds gilded, rolling along the horizon.

That evening, without thought of Spring, I began to look at my maps. Spring would come, of course—nothing, I supposed, could prevent it—and I should have to make up my mind how to go westward. Whatever I did, Salisbury Plain was to be crossed, not of necessity but of choice; it was, however, hard to decide whether to go reasonably diagonally in accordance with my western purpose, or to meander up the Avon, now on one side now on the other, by one of the parallel river-side roads, as far as Amesbury. Having got to Amesbury, there would be much provocation to continue up the river among those thatched villages to Upavon and to Stephen Duck’s village, Charlton, and the Pewsey valley, and so, turning again westward, in sight of that very tame White Horse above Alton Priors, to include Urchfont and Devizes.

Or, again, I might follow up the Wylye westward from Salisbury, and have always below me the river and its hamlets and churches, the wall of the Plain always above me on the right. Thus I should come to Warminster and to the grand west wall of the Plain which overhangs the town.

The obvious way was to strike north-west over the Plain from Stapleford up the Winterbourne, through cornland and sheepland, by Shrewton and Tilshead, and down again to other waters at West Lavington. Or at Shrewton I could turn sharp to the west, and so visit solitary Chitterne and solitary Imber.

I could not decide. If I went on foot, I could do as I liked on the Plain. There are green roads leading from everywhere to everywhere. But, on the other hand, it might be necessary at that time of year to keep walking all day, which would mean at least thirty miles a day, which was more than I was inclined for. The false Spring, the weather that really deluded me to think it shameful not to trust it, came a month later, and one of its best days was in London.

Many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we are at ease or not. This was not one of them. Rain lashed and wind roared in the night, enveloping my room in a turbulent embrace as if it had been a tiny ship in a great sea, instead of one pigeon-hole in a thousand-fold columbarium deep in London. Dawn awakened me with its tranquillity. The air was sombrely sweet; there was a lucidity under the gloom of the clouds; the air barely heaved with the ebb of storm; and even when the sun was risen it seemed still twilight. The jangle of the traffic made a wall round about the quiet in which I lay embedded. I scarcely heard the sound of it; but I could not forget the wall. Within the circle of quiet a parrot sang the street songs of twenty years ago very clearly, over and over again, almost as sweetly as a blackbird. I had heard him many times before, but now he sang differently—I did not know or consider how or why. The song was different as the air was. Yet I could not directly feel the air, because the windows were tightly shut against the soot of four neighbouring chimney-stacks.

Out of doors the business and pleasure of the day kept me a close though a moving prisoner. All the morning and afternoon I was glad to see only one thing that was not a human face. It was a portico of high fluted columns rising in a cliff above an expanse of gravel walks and turf. The gray columns were blackened with soot splashes. The grass and the stone were touched with the sweetness that was in the early air and in the bird’s song before the rain had dried and the wind quite departed. Both were blessed with the same pure and lovely union of humid coldness, gloom, and lucidity, so that the portico appeared for a moment to be the entrance to halls of unimagined beauty and holiness, as if I should be admitted through them into the cloud-ramparted city of that earlier day. Nevertheless, I found all inside exactly as it had always been; not only the expectation but even the memory of what had fostered it was wiped out without one pause of disappointment. The sunlight, now and then flooding and astonishing the interior, fell through windows that shut out both sky and earth, into an atmosphere incapable of acknowledging the divinity of the rays; they were alien, disturbing, hostile. There was something childish in these displays, so wasteful and passionate, before the spectacled eyes of a number of people reading books in the mummied air of a library.

Once more on this February day, at four in the afternoon, my eyes were unsealed and awakened. The air in the streets of big dark houses was still and hazy, but overhead hung the loftiest sky I had ever seen, and the finest of fine-spun clouds stretched across the pale blue in long white reefs. In a few moments I was again under a roof. This time it was the house of a friend, removed from busy thoroughfares, very silent within. As the old country servant, faintly dingy and sinister, led me up to the usual room, the staircase, and both the shut and the half-seen apartments on either hand, were mysterious and depressing, with something massive and yet temporary, as if in a dream mansion of shadows. Nothing definite was suggested by these doors; anything was possible behind them. Right up to the familiar dark room I always felt the same dull trouble. Then the dim room opened before me: I heard the masterly, kind voice.

It was a high, large room with many corners that I had never explored. The furniture gloomed vaguely above and around the little space that was crossed by our two voices. The long windows were some yards away, and between them and us stood a heavy table, a heavy cabinet, and several chairs. Never had I been to the window and looked out, nor did I today. No lamp was lit. We talked, we were silent, and I was content. Now and then I looked towards the window, which framed only the corner of a house near by, the chimneys of farther houses, and a pallor of sky between and above them. I was aware of the slow stealing away of day. I knew it was slow, and twice I looked at a clock to make sure that I was not being deceived. I was aware also of the beauty of this slow fading. No wind moved, nor was any movement anywhere heard or seen. The stillness and silence were great; the tranquillity was even greater: I dipped into it and shared it while I listened and talked. Several times two or three children passed beneath the window and chattered in loud, shrill voices, but they were unseen. Far from disturbing the tranquillity, the sounds were steeped in it; the silence and stillness of the twilight saturated and embalmed them. But pleasant as in themselves they were entirely, they were far more so by reason of what they suggested.

These voices and this tranquillity spoke of Spring. They told me what an evening it was at home. I knew how the first blackbird was whistling in the broad oak, and, farther away—some very far away—many thrushes were singing in the chill, under the pale light fitly reflected by the faces of earliest primroses. The sound of lambs and of a rookery more distant blended in soft roaring. Underfoot everything was soaked—soaked clay, soaked dead grass; and the land was agleam with silver rain pools and channels. I foresaw tempest of rain and wind on the next day. Perhaps imagination of dark, withered, and sodden land, and the change threatening, helped to perfect that sweetness which was not wholly of earth. The songs of the birds were to cease, and, in their place, blackbirds would be clinking nervously in impenetrable thickets long after sundown, when only a narrowing pane of almost lightless light divided a black mass of cloud from a black horizon. As in the morning streets the essence of the beauty was lucidity in the arms of gloom, so it was now in the clear twilight fields gliding towards black night, tempest, and perhaps a renewal of Winter.... Then a lamp was carried in. The children’s voices had gone. In a little while I rose, and, going out, saw precisely that long pane of light that I should have seen low in the west, had I been standing fifty miles off, looking towards Winchester.

Another evening like this one followed. To the south and west of me the Downs were spread out beyond eyesight. Their flowing and quiet lines were an invitation, a temptation. I should have liked to set forth immediately, to travel day and night with that flow and quiet until I reached the nightingale’s song, the apple blossom, the perfume of sunny earth. But nothing was more impossible. The next day was sleet. The most I could do was to plan so that perhaps I should find myself travelling in one of those preludes to Summer which are less false than this one. The beautiful Easters I had known came back to me: Easters of five years, twenty years ago; early Easters when the chiffchaff was singing on March 20 in a soft wind; later Easters, when Good Friday brought the swallow, Saturday the cuckoo, Sunday the nightingale. I did not forget Easters of snow and of north wind. In the end I decided to trust to luck—to start on Good Friday on the chance that I should meet fine weather at once or in a day or two. I would go out in that safe, tame fashion, looking for Spring. The date of Easter made nightingales and cuckoos improbable; but I might hope for the chiffchaff, an early martin, some stitchwort blossoms, cuckoo flowers, some larch green, some blackthorn white. I began to think of what the days would be like. Would there be an invisible sky and a coldish wind, yet some ground for hoping, because the blackbirds would be content in their singing at evening, and the dead leaves that trundle in the road would have decreased to a handful? Perhaps there would be another of these dimly promising days. On the third, would the misty morning clear slowly, the Downs barely visible under the low drift, behind which the sky is caked in cloud, with a dirty silver light from the interstices? And would there be one place in this sky which it would be impossible to gaze at, and would this at last become dazzling, would the drift vanish, and the Downs and half the valley be hid in the foundations of a stationary mass of sunlit white cloud? Would the earth begin to crumble in the warm breeze? Would the bees be heard instead of the wind? Would the jackdaws play and cry far up in the pale vault? Would the low east become a region of cumulus clouds, old-ivory-coloured, receding with sunny edges one behind the other infinitely? Would the evening sky be downy-white and clouded softly over the dark copses and the many songs interwoven at seven? Would a clear still night follow, with Lyra and a multitude of stars? So I questioned. But I will relate something of what happened in the month of waiting and preparation.

Next day the north-east wind began to prevail, making a noise as if the earth were hollow and rumbling all through the bright night, and all day a rhythmless and steady roar. The earth was being scoured like a pot. If snow fell, there was no more of it in the valleys than if a white bird had been plucked by a sparrow-hawk: on the hills it lasted longer, but as thin as rice the day after a wedding. The wind was eager enough to scour me. Doubtless, an old man or two, and an infant or two, it both scoured and killed. The yellow celandine flowers were bright but shrivelled; the ivy gleamed blackly on the banks beside the white roads. These were days of great rather than of little things; the north-east wind that was cleaning, and the world that was being cleaned. The old man, the child, and the celandine, mattered little. Such days are good to live in, better to remember.

Very meekly, and in the night, the north-east wind gave up its power to the south. Mild, sweet, and soft days followed, when the earth was an invalid certain of recovery, with many delicate smiles and languors and fatigues, and little vain fears or recollections. By St. David’s Day violets began to disclose themselves to children and some lovers.... Copses, hedges, roadsides, and brooksides were taken possession of by millions of primroses in thick, long-stemmed clusters; their green, only just flowerlike, scent was suited perfectly to the invalid but strengthening earth.

Then for most of a day it rained, and what was done under cover of that deliberate, irresistible rain, only a poet can tell. There are more trees than men on the earth, more flowers than children, and on that day the earth was such as I can imagine it before man or god had been invented. It was an earlier than prehistoric day. The sun rose glimmeringly in mist, as yet not strongly, but sure of victory over chaos. What will happen? What shall come of it? What will be the new thing? On such a day the song of birds was first heard upon the earth.... As I went along I found myself repeating with an inexplicable and novel fervour the words, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.” No possible supplication to “Earth, Ocean, Air—Eternal Brotherhood,” could have been more satisfying. From time to time other incantations also seemed appropriate, as, for example,—

“Oh, Santiana’s won the day—

Away, Santiana!—

Santiana’s won the day

Along the plains of Mexico.”

There followed an ordinary fine day, warm but fresh, with more than one light shower out of the south-west during the afternoon; after that a cloudy, rainless day, which people did not call fine, though the chaffinches and thrushes enjoyed it wholly; and after that, rain again, and the elms standing about like conspirators in the mist of the rain, preparing something; then a day, warm and bright, of a heavenly and yet also a spirited loveliness—the best day of the year, when the larks’ notes were far beyond counting; and after that wind and rain again; a day of great wind and no rain; then two days of mild, quick air, both glooming into black nights of tumult, with frosty, penitent-looking dawns. Snow succeeded, darkening the air, whitening the sky, on the wings of a strong wind from the north of north-west, for a minute only, but again and again, until by five o’clock the sky was all blue except at the horizon, where stood a cluster of white mountains, massive and almost motionless, in the south above the Downs, and round about them some dusky fragments not fit to be used in the composition of such mountains. They looked as if they were going to last for ever. Yet by six o’clock the horizon was dim, and the clouds all but passed away, the Downs clear and extended; the blackbird singing as if the world were his nest, the wind cold and light, but dying utterly to make way for a beautiful evening of one star and many owls hooting.

The next day was the missel-thrush’s and the north-west wind’s. The missel-thrush sat well up in a beech at the wood edge and hailed the rain with his rolling, brief song: so rapidly and oft was it repeated that it was almost one long, continuous song. But as the wind snatched away the notes again and again, or the bird changed his perch, or another answered him or took his place, the music was roving like a hunter’s.... I looked at my maps. Should I go through Swindon, or Andover, or Winchester, or Southampton? I had a mind to compass all four; but the objection was that the kinks thus to be made would destroy any feeling of advance in the journey....

The night was wild, and on the morrow the earth lay sleeping a sweet, quiet sleep of recovery from the wind’s rage. The robin could be heard as often as the missel-thrush. The sleep lasted through a morning of frost and haze into a clear day, gentle but bright, and another and another of cloudy brightness, brightened cloudiness, rounded off between half-past five and half-past six by blackbirds singing. The nights were strange children for such days, nights of frantic wind and rain, threatening to undo all the sweet work in a swift, howling revolution. Trees were thrown down, branches broken, but the buds remained.

The north wind made an invasion with horizontal arrows of pricking hail in the day, and twice in the night a blue lightning, that long stood brandished within the room until thunder fell, disembowelling the universe, with no rolling sound, but a single plunge and rebound as of an enormous weight. With the day came snow, hail, and rain, each impotent to silence the larks for one minute after it had ceased. The half-moon at the zenith of a serene, frosty night led in a morning of mist that filled up all the hollows of the valley as with snow: each current of smoke from locomotive or cottage lay in solid and enduring vertebræ above the mist: the sun shone upon black rooks cawing moodily, upon snow and freshest green intermingled: the larks soared into the light white cloud; the bullfinch whispered a sweet, cracked melody, almost hid now in hawthorn leaves.

These things in their turn availed nothing against a wind swooping violently all night, sometimes with rain, sometimes without. Neither west wind nor rain respected daybreak: only at half-past one could the sun put his head out to see if the two had done quarrelling with the earth or with one another. The rain gave up, and the loose clouds strewn over the sky had no more order than the linen which was now hurriedly spread on the blossoming gorse-bushes to flatter the sun. In response, the sun poured out light on flooded waters, on purple brook-side thickets of alder, and celandines under them, and on solitary greening chestnuts, as if all was now to be well. The clouds massed themselves together in larger and whiter continents, the blue spaces widened. Yet though the sun went down in peace, what of the morrow?

Whatever happened, I was to start on Good Friday. I was now deciding that I would go through Salisbury, and over the Plain to West Lavington, and thence either through Devizes or through Trowbridge and Bradford. Salisbury was to be reached by Guildford, Farnham, Alton, Alresford, but perhaps not Winchester—for I could follow down the Itchen to King’s Worthy, and then cross those twenty miles of railwayless country by way of Stockbridge, visiting thus Hazlitt’s Winterslow. To Guildford there were several possible ways. The ordinary Portsmouth road, smooth enough for roller-skating, and passing through unenclosed piny and ferny commons one after another, did not overmuch attract me. Also, I wanted to see Ewell again, and Epsom, and Leatherhead, and to turn round between hill and water under Leatherhead Church and Mickleham Church to Dorking. Thus my ways out of London were reduced. I could, of course, reach Ewell by way of Kingston, Surbiton, and Tolworth, traversing some of Jefferies’ second country, and crossing the home of his “London trout.” But this was too much of a digression for the first day.

At any rate the Quantocks were to be my goal. I had a wish of a mildly imperative nature that Spring would be arriving among the Quantocks at the same time as myself—that “the one red leaf the last of its clan,” that danced on March 7, 1798, would have danced itself into the grave: that since my journey was to be in “a month before the month of May,” Spring would come fast, not slowly, up that way. Yes, I would see Nether Stowey, the native soil of “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Ancient Mariner,” where Coleridge fed on honey-dew and drank the milk of Paradise.

If I was to get beyond the Quantocks, it would only be for the sake of looking at Taunton or Minehead or Exmoor. Those hills were a distinct and sufficient goal, because they form the boundary between the south-west and the west. Beyond them lie Exmoor, Dartmoor, the Bodmin Moor, and Land’s End, a rocky and wilder land, though with many a delicate or bounteous interspace. On this side is the main tract of the south and the south-west, and the Quantocks themselves are the last great strongholds of that sweetness. Thither I planned to go, under the North Downs to Guildford, along the Hog’s Back to Farnham, down the Itchen towards Winchester, over the high lands of the Test to Salisbury; across the Plain to Bradford, over the Mendips to Shepton Mallet, and then under the Mendips to Wells and Glastonbury, along the ridge of the Polden Hills to Bridgwater, and so up to the Quantocks and down to the sea.

I was to start on roads leading into the Epsom road. Some regret I felt that I could not contrive to leave by the Brighton road. For I should thus again have enjoyed passing the green dome of Streatham Common, the rookery at Norbury, the goose-pond by the “Wheatsheaf” and “Horse-shoe,” and threading the unbroken lines of Croydon shops until Haling Park begins on the right hand, opposite the “Red Deer.” The long, low, green slope of the Park, the rookery elms on it, the chestnuts above the roadside fence, are among the pleasantest things which the besieging streets have made pleasanter. Haling Down, a straight-ridged and treeless long hill parallel to the road, is a continuation of that slope. In the midst it is broken by a huge chalk-pit, bushy and weathered, and its whole length is carved by an old road, always clearly marked either by the bare chalk of its banks or the stout thorn-bushes attending its course. Blocks of shops between the grass and the road, a street or two running up into it, as at the chalk-pit, and the announcement of building sites, have not spoiled this little Down, which London has virtually imprisoned. Anywhere in the chalk country its distinct individuality, the long, straight ridge and even flank, would gain it honour, but here it is a pure pastoral. It is good enough to create a poem at least equal (in everything but length) to “Windsor Forest” or “Cooper’s Hill,” if we had a local poet to-day. Beyond it, enclosed by the Eastbourne and Brighton roads, is a perfect small region of low downs, some bare, some wooded, some bushy, having Coulsdon in the centre.... But that was not to be my way.

Next day new dust was blowing over still wet mud, but the stainless blue of eight o’clock was veiled at nine. A thin gleam now and then illuminated the oaks, the fagots piled among primroses, and the copser himself. Half leaning against an oak, half reclining on his bed between two hurdles, he smoked and saw steadily and whole the train that rushed past the wood’s edge, the immense white cloud that pushed up slowly above the horizon, and the man following the roller down stripe after stripe of the next meadow, his head bent, his hand in his pocket. What sun there was, and perhaps more, had entered the rook’s cawing and the passages from “Madame Angot” tripping out of the barrel-organ. One isolated bent larch in a dark wood was green all over, a spirit of acrid green challenging the darkness. An angry little shower made my hope sputter, but the gleam—while the rain, white with light, was still falling—the soft bright gleam with which the worn flagstones answered the returning sun seemed to me pure Spring. If the rain fell again soon afterwards it only enriched the deep, after-rainy blue of evening, and made whiter the one planet that shone at half-past six upon the mud, the straight lines of traffic, and the parallels of white and yellow lamps. As deeply as one pearl dropped in mid-Atlantic was that planet lost in the storms of the night, when the rain and the south-west wind raved together. Yet I had planned to start on the next day.

II.
THE START: LONDON TO GUILDFORD.

I had planned to start on March 21, and rather late than early, to give the road time for drying. The light arrived bravely and innocently enough at sunrise; too bravely, for by eight o’clock it was already abashed by a shower. There could be no doubt that either I must wait for a better day, or at the next convenient fine interval I must pretend to be deceived and set out prepared for all things. So at ten I started, with maps and sufficient clothes to replace what my waterproof could not protect from rain.

The suburban by-streets already looked rideable; but they were false prophets: the main roads were very different. For example, the surface between the west end of Nightingale Lane and the top of Burntwood Lane was fit only for fancy cycling—in and out among a thousand lakes a yard wide and three inches deep. These should either have been stocked with gold-fish and aquatic plants or drained, but some time had been allowed to pass without either course being adopted. It may be that all the draining forces of the neighbourhood had been directed to emptying the ornamental pond on Wandsworth Common. Empty it was, and the sodden bed did not improve the look of the common—flat by nature, flatter by recent art. The gorse was in bloom amidst a patchwork of turf, gravel, and puddle. Terriers raced about or trifled. A flock of starlings bathed together in a puddle until scared by the dogs. A tall, stern, bald man without a hat strode earnestly in a straight line across the grass and water, as if pleasure had become a duty. He was alone on the common. In all the other residences, that form walls round the common almost on every side, hot-cross buns had proved more alluring than the rain and the south-west wind. The scene was, in fact, one more likely to be pleasing in a picture than in itself. It was tame: it was at once artificial and artless, and touched with beauty only by the strong wind and by the subdued brightness due to the rain. Its breadth and variety were sufficient for it to respond—something as Exmoor or Mousehold Heath or Cefn Bryn in Gower would have responded—to the cloudily shattered light, the threats and the deceptions, and the great sweep of the wind. But there was no one painting those cold expanses of not quite lusty grass, the hard, dull gravel, the shining puddles, the dark gold-flecked gorse, the stiff, scanty trees with black bark and sharp green buds, the comparatively venerable elms of Bolingbroke Grove, the backs and fronts of houses of no value save to their owners, and the tall chimney-stacks northwards. Perhaps only a solitary artist, or some coldish sort of gnome or angel, could have thoroughly enjoyed this moment. That it was waiting for such a one I am certain; I am almost equally certain that he could create a vogue in scenes like this one, which are only about a thousandth part as unpleasant as a cold bath, and possess, furthermore, elements of divinity lacking both to the cold bath and to the ensuing bun.

It is easier to like the blackbird’s shrubbery, the lawn, the big elm, or oak, and the few dozen fruit trees, of the one or two larger and older houses surviving—for example, at the top of Burntwood Lane. The almond, the mulberry, the apple trees in these gardens have a menaced or actually caged loveliness, as of a creature detained from some world far from ours, if they are not, as in some cases they are, the lost angels of ruined paradises.

Burntwood Lane, leading down from a residential district to an industrial district, is no longer as pretty as its name. Also, when it seems to be aiming at the country, it turns into a street of maisonettes, with a vista of houses terminated by the two tall red chimneys of the Wimbledon Electricity Works. But it has its character. The Lunatic Asylum helps it with broad, cultivated squares, elms, and rooks’ nests, and the voices of cows and pigs behind the railings that line it on the left hand from top to bottom. On the right, playfields waiting to be built all over give it a lesser advantage. How sorry are the unprotected elms on that side! They will never be old. Man, child, and dog, walking in and out of them, climbing them, kicking and cutting them, have made them as little like trees as it is possible for them to be while they yet live. They have one hour of prettiness, when the leaf-buds are as big as peas on the little side sprays low down. Then on a Saturday—or on a Sunday, when the path is darkened by adults in their best clothes—the children come and pick the sprays in bunches instead of primroses. For there are no primroses, no celandines, no dandelions outside the fences in Burntwood Lane. And Garratt Green at the bottom is now but a railed-in, perfectly level square for games, with rules on a notice-board. It is greener than when it was crossed diagonally by paths, and honoured on a Saturday by gypsies and coconut-shies. Probably it now gives some satisfaction to the greatest number possible, but nobody will ever again, until After London, think of Garratt Green as a sort of country place. I went round it and its footballers in haste. Nor is that thickening portion of London beyond it easily made to appear beautiful or interesting. It is flat and low, suitable rather for vegetables than men, and built on chiefly because people can always be enticed into new houses. The flatter and lower and more suitable for vegetables, the more easily satisfied are the people with their houses, partly because they are poor, partly because they are half country folk and like this kind of land, it may be, and the river Wandel, the watercress beds, the swampy places, the market gardens, the cabbages and lavender, and Mitcham Fair, more than they would like the church-parade along Bolingbroke Grove, the bands, the teetotallers, the atheists, and the tennis-players, on the commons which have a gravel soil.

As I left the Green I noticed Huntspill Road. Why is it Huntspill Road? I thought at once of Huntspill in Somerset, of Highbridge on the Brue, of Brent Knoll, of Burnham and Hunt’s Pond, and the sandhills and the clouded-yellow butterflies that shared the hollows of the sandhills with me in the Summer once. Such is the way of street names, particularly in London suburbs, where free play is given to memory and fancy. I suppose, if I were to look, I should find names as homely as the Florrie Place and Lily Place at lower Farringdon near Alton, or the Susannah’s Cottage and Katie’s Cottage near Canute’s Palace at Southampton. But Beatrice, Ayacanora, or Megalostrate would be as likely. To the casual, curious man, these street names compose an outdoor museum as rich as any in the world. They are the elements of a puzzle map of England which gradually we fill in, now recognizing from a bus-top the name of a Wiltshire village, and again among the Downs coming upon a place which had formerly been but a name near Clapham Junction.

Not far beyond Huntspill Road, at what is called (I think) New Wimbledon, I noticed a De Burgh Street. Do you remember how Borrow, speaking of the tricks of fortune, says that he has seen a descendant of the De Burghs who wore the falcon mending kettles in a dingle? He counted himself one of the De Burghs. De Burgh Street is a double row of more than dingy—better than dingy—swarthy, mulatto cottages, ending in a barrier of elm trees. The monotony of the tiny front gardens is broken by a dark pine tree in one, and by an inn called the “Sultan”—not “Sweet Sultan,” which is a flower, but “Sultan,” a dusky king. And out of the “Sultan,” towards me, strode a gaunt, dusky man, with long black ringlets dangling from under his hard hat down over his green and scarlet neckerchief. His tight trousers, his brisk gait, and his hairless jib, were those of a man used to horses and to buyers and sellers of horses. He came rapidly and to beg. Rapid was his begging, exquisitely finished in its mechanical servility. His people were somewhere not far off, said he. That night he had travelled from St. Albans to rejoin them. They were not here: they must be at Wandsworth, with the vans and horses. All questions were answered instantly, briefly, and impersonally. The incident was but a pause in his rapid career from the “Sultan” to Wandsworth. He took the price of a pint with a slight appearance of gratitude, and departed with long, very quick steps, head down, face almost hidden by his bowler.

But there was much to be seen between Huntspill Road and De Burgh Road. The scene, for instance, from the corner by the “Plough,” the “Prince Albert,” and the “White Lion,” at Summerstown, was curious and typical. These three great houses stand at the edge of the still cultivated and unpopulated portion of the flat land of the Wandel—the allotment gardens, the watercress beds, the meadows plentifully adorned with advertisements and thinly sprinkled with horse and cow, but not lacking a rustic house and a shed or two, and to-day a show of plum-blossom. This suburban landscape had not the grace of Haling Park and Down, but at that moment its best hour was beginning. The main part visible was twenty acres of damp meadow. On the left it was bounded by the irregular low buildings of a laundry, a file and tool factory, and a chamois-leather mill; on the right by the dirty backs of Summerstown. On the far side a neat, white, oldish house was retiring amid blossoming fruit trees under the guardianship of several elms, and the shadow of those two tall red chimneys of the Electricity Works. On my side the meadow had a low black fence between it and the road, with the addition, in one place, of high advertisement boards, behind which lurked three gypsy vans. A mixture of the sordid and the delicate in the whole was unmistakable.

Skirting the meadow, my road led up to the Wandel and a mean bridge. The river here is broadened for a hundred yards between the bridge and the chamois-leather mill or Copper Mill. The buildings extend across and along one side of the water; a meadow comes to the sedgy side opposite. The mill looks old, has tarred boards where it might have had corrugated iron, and its neighbours are elms and the two chimneys. It is approached at one side by a lane called Copper Mill Lane, where the mud is of a sort clearly denoting a town edge or a coal district. Above the bridge the back-yards of new houses have only a narrow waste between them and the Wandel, and on this was being set up the coconut-shy that would have been on Garratt Green twenty years ago.

The rain returned as I was crossing the railway bridge by Hayden’s Road station. It was raining hard when the gypsy left the “Sultan,” and still harder when I turned to the right along Merton Road. Rather than be soaked thus early, I took the shelter offered by a bird-shop on the left hand. This was not a cheerful or a pretty place. Overhead hung a row of cages containing chaffinches—battered ones at a shilling, a neater one at eighteen-pence—that sang every now and then,—

“My life and soul, as if he were a Greek.”

Inside the shop, linnets at half a crown were rushing ceaselessly against the bars of six-inch cages, their bosoms ruffled and bloody as if from the strife, themselves like wild hearts beating in breasts too narrow. “House-moulted” goldfinches (price 5s. 6d.) were making sounds which I should have recognized as the twittering of goldfinches had I heard them among thistles on the Down tops. Little, bright foreign birds, that would have been hardly more at home there than here, looked more contented. A gold-fish, six inches long, squirmed about a globe with a diameter of six inches, in the most complete exile imaginable. The birds at least breathed air not parted entirely from the south-west wind which was now soaking the street; but the fish was in a living grave. The place was perhaps more cheerless to look at than to live in, but in a short time three more persons took shelter by it, and after glancing at the birds, stood looking out at the rain, at the dull street, the tobacconist’s, news-agent’s, and confectioner’s shops alone being unshuttered. Presently one of the three shelterers entered the bird-shop, which I had supposed shut; the proprietor came out for a chaffinch; and in a minute or two the customer left with an uncomfortable air and something fluttering in a paper bag such as would hold a penn’orth of sweets. He mounted a bicycle, and I after him, for the rain had forgotten to fall. He turned up to the left towards Morden station, which was my way also. Not far up the road he was apparently unable to bear the fluttering in the paper bag any longer; he got down, and with an awkward air, as if he knew how many great men had done it before, released the flutterer. A dingy cock chaffinch flew off among the lilacs of a garden, saying “Chink.” The deliverer was up and away again.

For some distance yet the land was level. The only hill was made by the necessity of crossing a railway at Morden station. At that point rows of houses were discontinued; shops and public-houses with a lot of plate-glass had already ceased. The open stretches were wider and wider, of dark earth, of vegetables in squares, or florists’ plantations, divided by hedges low and few, or by lines of tall elm trees or Lombardy poplars. Not quite rustic men and women stooped or moved to and fro among the vegetables: carts were waiting under the elms. A new house, a gasometer, an old house and its trees, lay on the farther side of the big field: behind them the Crystal Palace. On my right, in the opposite direction, the trees massed themselves together into one wood.

It is so easy to make this flat land sordid. The roads, hedges, and fences on it have hardly a reason for being anything but straight. More and more the kind of estate disappears that might preserve trees and various wasteful and pretty things: it is replaced by small villas and market gardens. If any waste be left under the new order, it will be used for conspicuously depositing rubbish. Little or no wildness of form or arrangement can survive, and with no wildness a landscape cannot be beautiful. Barbed wire and ugly and cruel fences, used against the large and irresponsible population of townsmen, add to the charmless artificiality. It was a relief to see a boy stealing up one of the hedges, looking for birds’ nests. And then close up against this eager agriculture and its barbed wires are the hotels, inns, tea-shops, and cottages with ginger-beer for the townsman who is looking for country of a more easy-going nature. This was inhospitable. On many a fence and gate had been newly written up in chalk by some prophet: “Eternity,” “Believe,” “Come unto Me.”

I welcomed the fences for the sake of what lay behind them. Now it was a shrubbery, now a copse, and perhaps a rookery, or a field running up mysteriously to the curved edge of a wood, and at Morden Hall it was a herd of deer among the trees. The hedges were good in themselves, and for the lush grass, the cuckoo-pint, goose-grass, and celandine upon their banks. Walking up all the slightest hills because of the south-west wind, I could see everything, from the celandines one by one and the crowding new chestnut leaves, to the genial red brick tower of St. Laurence’s Church at Morden and the inns one after another—the “George,” the “Lord Nelson,” the “Organ,” the “Brick Kiln,” the “Victoria.” Nelson’s hatchment is still on the wall of Merton Church: his name is the principal one for inns in the neighbourhood. Ewell, for example, has a “Lord Nelson,” where the signboard shows Nelson and the telescope on one side, and the Victory on the other.

The liberator of the chaffinch and I no longer had the road to ourselves as we struggled on in the mud between old houses, villas, dingy tea-shops, hoardings, and fields that seemed to produce crops of old iron and broken crockery. If the distant view at one moment was all elm trees, at the next it was a grand new instalment of London, ten fields away. But all of us must have looked mainly at the road ahead, making for some conjectural “world far from ours.” The important thing was to get out of this particular evil, not to inquire whether worse came after.

Only the most determined people were on the road. Motor cycles and side-cars bore middle-aged men with their wives or children, poorish-looking young men with their girls. Once or twice a man dashed by with a pretty girl smiling above his back wheel, perfectly balanced. But the greater number of my fellow-travellers were cyclists carrying luncheons and waterproofs. In one band seven or eight lean young chaps in dark clothes bent over their handle-bars, talking in jerks as they laboured, all stopping together at any call for a drink or to mend a puncture. They swore furiously, but (I believe) not in anger, at a nervous woman crossing in front of them. If conversation flagged, one or other of them was certain to break out into song with,—

“Who were you with last night

Out in the pale moonlight?

It wasn’t your missus,

It wasn’t your ma.

Ah, ah, ah, ah! ... ah!

Will you tell your missus

When you get home

Who you were with last night?”

The clouds hung like pudding-bags all over the sky, but the sad, amorous, jaunty drivel seemed to console them.

Some way past Morden these braves were jeering at the liberator of the chaffinch, who stood in the middle of the road with a book and pencil. He was drawing a weather-vane above a house on the left hand. The long, gilt dragon, its open mouth, sharp ears, sharp upright wings, and thin curled tail, had attracted him, although the arrow-head at the tip of the tail was pointing south-westward, and rain was falling. “It’s rather curious,” he remarked, as I came up to him, “there is no ingenuity in weather-vanes. One has to put up with the Ship and the Cock erected over the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, and think oneself really lucky to come across the Centaur with his bow and arrow at the brass-foundry, you know, on the left just before you come to the top of Tottenham Court Road from Portland Road station.” But it was blowing hard, and there was little reason for me to suppose that he was addressing me, or for him to suppose that I heard him. However, it was a kind of introduction. On we rode.

I had been about two hours reaching the gate of Nonsuch Park, and the fountain and cross there commemorating a former mistress, Charlotte Farmer, who died in 1906. The other man was reading aloud the inscription,—

“As thirsty travellers in a desert land

Welcome a spring amidst a waste of sand,

So did her kindly actions cheer the sad,

Refresh the worn, and make the weary glad.”

I tried to get water, but there was none. Nevertheless, the fountain was a pretty thing on that plot of grass where the road zigzags opposite the gate and avenue of Nonsuch. A dove and an olive branch, of ruddiest gilding, is perched on the cross tip.

“Wretched weather,” said the man, speaking through the pencil in his mouth, as he straddled on to his bicycle. At Ewell I lost him by going round behind the new church to look at the old tower. This completely ivy-covered square tower is all that remains of an old church. If the rest was as little decayed, there can hardly have been a good reason for demolishing it. The doors were locked. I could only walk about among the trees, glancing at the tombs of the Glyn family, and the headstone of Edward Wells (who died in 1742, at the age of sixteen) and the winged skull adorning it.

Ewell was the first place on my road which bore a considerable resemblance to a country town. It stands at the forking of a Brighton and a Worthing road. Hereby rises the Hogsmill river; its water flows alongside the street, giving its name to the “Spring Inn.” The name Ewell, like that of Oxfordshire Ewelme, seems and is said to be connected with the presence of water. The place is not a mere roadside collection of houses with a variegated, old look, but a town at which roads meet, pause, take a turn or two, and exchange greetings, before separating from one another and from Ewell. The town probably struck those escaping Londoners on bicycles as one where the sign of the “Green Man” was in keeping. Comfortable houses on the outskirts, with high trees and shrubberies, and an avenue of limes crossing the road at right angles, confirm the fancy. It marked a definite stage on the road from London.

The end of Ewell touched the beginning of Epsom, which had to be entered between high walls of advertisements—yards of pictures and large letters—asserting the virtues of clothes, food, drugs, etc., one sheet, for example, showing that by eating or drinking something you gained health, appetite, vigour, and a fig-leaf. The exit was better.

Epsom had the same general effect as Ewell, but more definite and complete, thanks to a few hundred yards of street broad enough for a market which, for the most part, satisfied the town eye as countrified and old-fashioned. Over one of its corn-chandlers’ a carved horse’s head was stuck up. There was an empty inn called the “Tun,” a restaurant named after Nell Gwynn. True, there is a fortnight’s racing yearly, and a number of railway stations, in consequence; and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” is on sale there: but, as in Nell Gwynn’s time and Defoe’s time, it is a place for putting off London thoughts. There is no king there now, no king’s mistress presumably, no nightly ball even in July, no bowls, no strutting to the Wells to drink what the chemist sells at twopence a pound, no line of trees down the middle of the broad street. Nor, accordingly, is there the same wintry dereliction as in those days. When the leaves fall in Autumn the people do not all fly, the houses are not all shut up, the walks do not go out of repair, the roads do not become full of sloughs. But it always was a pleasure resort. For more than a hundred years before railways, London business men used to keep their families at Epsom and ride daily to and from the Exchange or their warehouses. The very market that it had on Fridays had been obtained for it by a plotting apothecary named Livingstone. This man tried to diddle the world by putting up a pump, not over the good old cathartic spring, but over a new one that was not cathartic; and the world gave up both old and new. To-day only the poor and simple go to Epsom for pleasure apart from racing. Anybody and everybody with feet or wheels can get there from London on a holiday or even a half-holiday.

The exit from Epsom was almost free from advertisements. And then the common: it had a sea-like breadth and clearness. The one man among the soaked, flowering gorse-bushes and new green hawthorn was extremely like the liberator of the chaffinch and collector of weather-vanes. He was sketching something in the rain. The only others of humankind visible were on the road, struggling south-west or rushing towards London, or on the side of the road, hoping to sell ginger-beer and lemonade to travellers. This hedgeless gorse-land, first on both sides, then on the right only, reached to the verge of Ashtead, but with some change of character. The larger part was gently billowing gorse flower and hawthorn leaf. The last part was flat, wet, and rushy. The gorse came to an end, and here was a copse of oak. At intervals of thirty yards or so were oaks as old as Epsom, of a broad kind, forking close to the ground, iron-coloured and stained with faint green. Oaks not more than forty or fifty years old, tall instead of spreading, their lower branches broken off, grew between. Among these, dead fern and bramble with its old leaves made distinct island thickets, out of which stood a few thorns. And the thin grasses around the thickets were strewn with dead twigs and leaves, and some paper and broken bottles left there in better weather. A robin sang in one of the broad oaks, whether any one listened or not.

On the opposite side of the road—that is to say, on the left—the common had given way to Ashtead Park. There the big iron-coloured oaks stood aristocratically about on gentle green slopes. To Ashtead Park belonged the Hon. Mary Greville Howard, who died in 1877, at the age of ninety-two, and is commemorated by a fountain on the right hand which gave me this information. The fountain is placed on a square of much-trodden bare earth close to the road, surmounted by a cross. Whatever were the good deeds which persuaded her friends to erect the fountain, that was a good deed. It was not dry, and, I have been told, never is.

Ashtead itself is more suburban than either Ewell or Epsom. It appeared to be a collection of residences about as incapable of self-support as could anywhere be found—a private-looking, respectable, inhospitable place that made the rain colder, and doubtless, in turn, coloured the spectacles it was seen through. The name of its inn, the “Leg of Mutton and Cauliflower,” may be venerable, but it smacked of suburban fancy, as if it had been bestowed to catch the pennies of easy-going lovers of quaintness.

They were beginning to create a new Ashtead a little farther on. A placard by a larch copse at the edge of a high-walled marl-pit, announced that convenient and commanding houses were to be built shortly to supply the new golf links with golfers. A road had been driven through the estate. The young, green larches stood at the entrance like well-drilled liveried pages, ready to give way or die according to the requirements of golfers, but for the present enjoying the rain and looking as larch-like as possible above the curved gray wall of the pit.

Not much after this, Leatherhead began, two broken lines of villas, trees, and shrubberies, leading to a steep country street and, at its foot, the Mole,

“Four streams: whose whole delight in island lawns,

Dark-hanging alder dusks and willows pale

O’er shining gray-green shadowed waterways,

Makes murmuring haste of exit from the vale—

Through fourteen arches voluble

Where river tide-weed sways.” ...

CUCKOO FLOWERS

Leatherhead Mill.

As I looked this time from Leatherhead Bridge, I recalled “Aphrodite at Leatherhead,” and these, its opening lines, by John Helston, the town’s second poet. It is no new thing to stop on the bridge and look up the river to the railway bridge, and down over the divided water to the level grass, the tossing willows, the tall poplars scattered upon it, the dark elms beside, and Leatherhead rising up from it to the flint tower of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, and its umbrageous churchyard and turf as of grass-green silk. The bridge is good in itself, and the better for this view and for the poem. The adjacent inn, the “Running Horse,” and Elinour Rumming who brewed ale there and sold it to travellers—

“Tinkers and sweaters and swinkers

And all good ale-drinkers”—

four hundred years ago, these were the theme of a poet, Henry the Eighth’s laureate, John Skelton.

Having ridden down to the bridge, I walked up again, for I had no intention of going on over the Mole by the shortest road to Guildford. It is a good road, but a high and rather straight one through parks and cornland, and scarcely a village. The wide spaces on both hands, and the troops and clusters of elm trees, are best in fine weather, particularly in Autumn. I took the road through Mickleham and Dorking. Thus I wound along, having wooded hills, Leatherhead Downs, Mickleham Downs, Juniper Hill, and Box Hill, always steep above on the left, and on the right the Mole almost continually in sight below.

They were still worshipping in the Church of St. Mary and St. Nicholas. Outside it what most pleased me were the cross near a young cedar which was erected in 1902 “to the praise and glory of God, and the memory of the nameless dead,” and the epitaph: “Here sleepeth, awaiting the resurrection of the just, William Lewis, Esq., of the East India Company.” The memory of a human being that can exist without a name is but the shadow of the shadow that a name casts, and it is hard not to wonder what effect the cross can have on those who await the resurrection of the just, or indeed, on any one but Geraldine Rickards, at whose expense it was placed here.

The road, bending round under the churchyard and its trees, followed the steeper side of the Mole valley, and displayed to me the meadow, young corn, and ploughland, running up from the farther bank to beech woods. The clouds were higher and harder. The imprisoned pale sun, though it could not be seen, could be felt at the moments when a bend offered shelter from the wind. The change was too late for most of my fellow-travellers: they had stopped or turned back at Leatherhead. I was almost alone as I came into Mickleham, except for a horseman and his dog. This man was a thick, stiff man in clay-coloured rough clothes and a hard hat; his bandy, begaitered legs curled round the flanks of a piebald pony as thick and stiff as himself. He carried an ash-plant instead of a riding-whip, and in his mouth a pipe of strong, good tobacco. I had not seen such a country figure that day, though I dare say there were many among the nameless dead in Leatherhead churchyard, awaiting the resurrection of the just with characteristic patience. His dog also was clay-coloured, as shaggy and as large as a sheep, and exceedingly like a sheep. Probably he was a man who could have helped me to understand, for example, the epitaph of Benjamin Rogers in Mickleham churchyard,—

“Here peaceful sleep the aged and the young,

The rich and poor, an undistinguished throng.

Time was these ashes lived; a time must be

When others thus shall stand and look at thee.”

I had at first written,—

“Time was these ashes lov’d.”

His wife, Mary, who died at fifty-five in 1755, is hard by under an arch of ancient ivy against the wall. She speaks from the tomb,—

“How lov’d, how valu’d once avails thee not:

To whom related, or by whom begot.

A heap of dust alone remains of thee.

’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.”

That this desperate Christian, Mary Rogers, had any special knowledge of these matters, I have no reason for believing. I even doubt if she really thought that love was of as little importance as having a lord in the family. The lines were composed in a drab ecstasy of conventional humility, lacking genuine satisfaction in the thought that she and the more beautiful and the better-dressed were become equals. But I did not ask the clay-coloured man’s opinion. I rode behind him into Mickleham, and there lost him between the “Running Horse” (or, at least, an inn with two racing horses for a sign) and the “William the Fourth.” The loyalty of Mickleham, in thus preserving the memory of a sort of a king for three-quarters of a century, is sublime. Mickleham is, apart from its gentlemen’s residences, an old-fashioned place, accommodating itself in a picturesque manner to the hillside against which it has to cling, in order to avoid rolling into the Mole. The root-suckers and the trunk shoots of the elm trees were in tiny leaf beside the road, the horse-chestnuts were in large but still rumpled leaf. The celandines on the steep banks found something like sunbeams to shine in. On the smooth slopes the grass was perfect, alternating with pale young corn, and with arable squares where the dung was waiting for a fine day before being spread. The small flints of the ploughland were as fresh and as bright as flowers.

When I got to Burford Bridge, the only man at the entrance of the Box Hill footpath was a man selling fruit and drink and storing bicycles, or hoping to begin doing these things. One motor car stood at the hotel door. The hill was bare, except of trees. But it would take centuries to wipe away the scars of the footpaths up it. For it has a history of two hundred years as a pleasure resort. Ladies and gentlemen used to go on a Sunday from Epsom to take the air and walk in the woods. The landlord of the “King’s Arms” at Dorking furnished a vault under a great beech on top, with chairs, tables, food, and drink. It was like a fair, what with the gentry and the country people crowding to see and to imitate. But the young men of Dorking were very virtuous in those days, or were anxious that others should be so. They paid the vault a visit on a Saturday and blew it up with gunpowder to put a stop to the Sabbath merriment. They, at least, did not believe that in the dust they would be merely the equals of the frivolous and fresh-air-loving rich.

Dorking nowadays has no objection to the popularity of Box Hill and similar resorts. It is a country town not wholly dependent on London, but its shops and inns are largely for the benefit of travellers of all degrees, and a large proportion of its inhabitants were not born in Dorking and will not die there. A number of visitors were already streaming back under umbrellas to the railway stations, for again it rained. The skylarks sang in the rain, but as man was predominant hereabouts, the general impression was cheerless. To many it must have seemed absurd that the Government—say, Mr. Lloyd George—or the County Council, or the Lord Mayor of Dorking, could not arrange for Good Friday to be a fine day. The handfuls of worshippers may have been more content, but they did not look so. Three-quarters of the windows in the long, decent high street were shuttered or blinded. Unless it was some one entering the “Surrey Yeoman” or “White Horse,” nobody did anything but walk as rapidly and as straight as possible along the broad flagged pavement.

Only a robust and happy man, or one in love, can be indifferent to this kind of March weather. Only a lover or a poet can enjoy it. The poet naturally thought of here and on such a day was Meredith of Box Hill. This man,

“Quivering in harmony with the tempest, fierce

And eager with tempestuous delight,”

was one of the manliest and deepest of earth’s lovers who have written books. From first to last he wrote as an inhabitant of this earth, where, as Wordsworth says, “we have our happiness or not at all,” just or unjust. Meredith’s love of earth was in its kind equal to Wordsworth’s. It was a more earthly kind, at the same time that it had a quality almost as swiftly winged as Shelley’s. His earliest poems were all saturated with English sun and wind. He prayed that “this joy of woods and fields” would never cease; and towards the end of his life he wrote one of the happiest of all the poems of age, the one which is quoted on the fly-leaf of Mr. Hudson’s “Adventures among Birds:”

“Once I was part of the music I heard

On the boughs, or sweet between earth and sky,

For joy of the beating of wings on high

My heart shot into the breast of a bird.

“I hear it now and I see it fly,

And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,

My heart shoots into the breast of a bird,

As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.”

What his “Juggling Jerry” said briefly—

“Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty,

Gold-like, and warm: it’s the prime of May.

Better than mortar, brick, and putty

Is God’s house on a blowing day”—

he himself said at greater length, with variations and footnotes.

Love of earth meant to him more than is commonly meant by love of Nature. Men gained substance and stability by it; they became strong—

“Because their love of earth is deep,

And they are warriors in accord

With life to serve.” ...

In his two sonnets called “The Spirit of Shakespeare” he said,—

“Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured

He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell

Of human passions, but of love deflowered

His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well.

Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips.” ...

Love of earth meant breadth, perspective, and proportion, and therefore humour,—

“Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.”

His Melampus, servant of Apollo, had a medicine, a “juice of the woods,” which reclaimed men,—

“That frenzied in some delirious rage

Outran the measure.” ...

So, in “The Appeasement of Demeter,” it was on being made to laugh that the goddess relented from her devastating sorrow, and the earth could revive and flourish again. The poet’s kinship with earth taught him to look at lesser passing things with a smile, yet without disdain; and he saw the stars as no “distant aliens” or “senseless powers,” but as having in them the same fire as we ourselves, and could, nevertheless, turn from them to sing “A Stave of Roving Tim:—”

“The wind is east, the wind is west,

Blows in and out of haven;

The wind that blows is the wind that’s best,

And croak, my jolly raven.

If here awhile we jigged and laughed,

The like we will do yonder;

For he’s the man who masters a craft,

And light as a lord can wander.

“So foot the measure, Roving Tim,

And croak, my jolly raven.

The wind, according to his whim,

Is in and out of haven.”

The “bile and buskin” attitude of Byron upon the Alps caused him to condemn “Manfred,” pronouncing, as one having authority,—

“The cities, not the mountains, blow

Such bladders; in their shape’s confessed

An after-dinner’s indigest.”

For his earth was definitely opposed to the “city.” He cried to the singing thrush in February,—

“I hear, I would the City heard.

“The City of the smoky fray;

A prodded ox, it drags and moans;

Its morrow no man’s child; its day

A vulture’s morsel beaked to bones.” ...

He tried to persuade the city that earth was not “a mother whom no cry can melt.” But his song was not clear enough, and when it was understood it said chiefly that man should love battle and seek it, and so make himself, even if a clerk or a philosopher, an animal worthy of the great globe, careless of death:—

“For love we Earth, then serve we all:

Her mystic secret then is ours:

We fall, or view our treasures fall,

Unclouded, as beholds her flowers

“Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,

Enrobed in morning’s mounted fire,

When lowly, with a broken neck,

The crocus lays her cheek to mire.”

He advanced farther, fanatically far, when he said of the lark’s song,—

“Was never voice of ours could say

Our inmost in the sweetest way,

Like yonder voice aloft, and link

All hearers in the song they drink.

Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,

Our passion is too full in flood,

We want the key of his wild note

Of truthful in a tuneful throat,

The song seraphically free

Of taint of personality.” ...

An impossibly noble savage might seem to have been his desire, a combination of Shakespeare and a Huron, of a “Wild god-ridden courser” and a study chair, though in practice perhaps a George Borrow delighted him less than a Leslie Stephen. But what he thought matters little compared with what he succeeded in saying, and with that sensuousness and vigour, both bodily and intellectual, which at his best he mingled as few poets have done. His “Love in the Valley” is the most English of love poems: the girl and the valley are purely and beautifully English. His early poem, “Daphne,” though treating a Greek myth, is equally English—altogether an open-air piece. No pale remembered orb, but the sun itself, and the wind, sweeten and brace the voluptuousness of both poems. And therefore it is that in passing Box Hill, whether the leaves of “the sudden-lighted whitebeam” are flashing, or lying, as now they were, but dimly hoary in the paths, I think of Meredith as I should not think of other poets in their territories. He was not so much an admirer and lover of Nature, like other poets, as a part of her, one of her most splendid creatures, fit to be ranked with the whitebeam, the lark, and the south-west wind that—

“Comes upon the neck of night,

Like one that leapt a fiery steed

Whose keen, black haunches quivering shine

With eagerness and haste.” ...

Riding against the south-west wind is quite another thing. That fiery steed which I had been dragging with me, as it were, instead of riding it, was not in the least exhausted, and I knew that I was unlikely to reach Farnham that evening. The telegraph wires wailed their inhuman lamentation. Thunder issued a threat of some sort far off.

At three, after eating, I was on the road again, making for Guildford by way of Wotton, Shere, and Shalford. If Dorking people will not have wine and women on top of Box Hill on a Sunday, they were, at any rate, strolling on the paths of their roadside common. The road was level, impossible to cycle on against the wind. But the eye was not starved; there was no haste. I now had the clear line of the Downs on my right hand, and was to have them so to Shalford. At first, in the region of Denbies, they were thoroughly tamed, their smoothness made park-like, their trees mostly fir. Beyond, their sides, of an almost uniform gentle steepness, but advancing and receding, hollowed and cleft, were adorned by unceasingly various combinations of beech wood, of scattered yew and thorn, of bare ploughland or young corn, and of naked chalk. The rolling commons at their feet, Milton Heath and Westcott Heath, were traversed by my road. Milton Heath, except for some rugged, heathery, pine-crested mounds on the right, was rather unnoticeable in comparison with Buryhill, a roof-like hill at right angles to the road on my left. This hill has a not very high but distinct, even ridge, and steep slopes of grass. Its trees are chiefly upon the top, embowering a classic, open summer-house.

After Milton Street came Westcott Heath and a low shingled spire up amid the gorse. The road was now cutting through sand, and the sand walls were half overgrown with moss and gorse, ivy and celandine, and overhung by wild cherry and beech. Behind me, as I climbed, a moment’s sunlight brought out the white scar of Box Hill.

Between the rising road and the Downs lay a hollow land, for nearly two miles occupied in its lowest part by the oaks of a narrow wood, called Deerleap Wood, running parallel to the road: sometimes the gray trunks were washed faintly with light, the accumulated branch-work proved itself purplish, and here and there the snick of a lost bough was bright. Over the summit of the wood I could see the chalky ploughland or pasture of the Downs, and their beechen ridge. The hollow land has a kind of island, steep and naturally moated, within it, and close to the road. Here stands Wotton Church, the home of dead Evelyns of Wotton, alone among tall beeches and chestnuts.

I had left behind me most cyclists from London, but I was now continually amongst walkers. There were a few genial muscular Christians with their daughters, and equally genial muscular agnostics with no children; bands of scientifically-minded ramblers with knickerbockers, spectacles, and cameras; a trio of young chaps singing their way to a pub.; one or two solitaries going at five miles an hour with or without hats; several of a more sentimental school in pairs, generally chosen from both sexes, disputing as to the comparative merits of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Arthur Sidgwick; and a few country people walking, not for pleasure, but to see friends seven or eight miles away, whom perhaps they had not visited for years, and, after such a Good Friday as this, never will again.

These travellers gave me a feeling that I had been forestalled (to put it mildly), and as the light began to dwindle, and to lose all intention of being brilliant, I allowed Guildford to hover before my mind’s eye, particularly when I saw St. Martha’s Church, a small, clear hilltop block six miles away, and I knew that Guildford was not two miles from it, by the Pilgrim’s Way or not. It was a satisfaction, though a trifling one, to be going with the water which was making for the Wey at Shalford. The streamlet, the Tillingbourne, began to assert itself at Abinger Hammer. Just before that village it runs alongside the road instead of a hedge, nourishing willows and supplying the bronzed watercress beds. The beginning of the village is a wheelwright’s shed under an elm by the road. Many hoops of wheels lean against the shed, many planks against the elm. The green follows, and Abinger Hammer is built round it. I preferred Gomshall—which only showed to the main road its inns and brewery—and the wet, bushy Gomshall Common. It is a resort of gypsies. A van full of newly-made baskets stood among the bushes, and the men sat on the shafts instead of joining the ramblers at the “Black Horse” or the “Compasses.” The downs opposite them were speckled black with yew.

I did not stop at Shere, “the prettiest village in Surrey,” and I saw no reason why it should not bear the title, or why it should be any the better liked for it. But I went to see the Silent Pool. Until it has been seen, everything is in the name. I had supposed it circular, tenebrous, and deep enough to be the receptacle of innumerable romantic skeletons. It is, in fact, an oblong pond of the size of a swimming bath, overhung on its two long sides and its far, short side, by ash trees. Its unrippled lymph, on an irregular chalk bottom of a singular pallid green, was so clear and thin that it seemed not to be water. It concealed nothing. A few trout glided here and there over the chalk or the dark green weed tufts. It had no need of romantic truth or fiction. Its innocent lucidity fascinated me.

Now another short cut to Guildford offered itself, by the road—an open and yellow road—up over Merrow Down. But the Downs were beginning to give me some shelter, and I went on under them, glad of the easier riding. The Tillingbourne here was running closer under the Downs, and the river level met the hillside more sharply than before. The road bent above the meadows and showed them flat to the very foot of a steep, brown slope covered with beeches. The sky lightened—lightened too much: St. Martha’s tower, almost reaching up into the hurrying white rack, was dark on its dark hill. So I came to Albury, which has the streamlet between it and the Downs, unlike Abinger Hammer, Gomshall, and Shere. The ground, used for vegetables and plum trees, fell steeply down to the water, beyond which it rose again as steeply in a narrow field bounded horizontally by a yet steeper strip of hazel coppice; beyond this again the rise was continued in a broader field extending to the edge of the main hillside beechwood. Albury is one of those villages possessing a neglected old church and a brand-new one. In this case the new is a decent enough one of alternating flint and stone, built among trees on a gradual rise. But the old one is too much like a shameless unburied corpse.

Twice I crossed the Tillingbourne, and came to where it broadened into a pond. This water on either side of the road was bordered by plumed sedges and clubbed bulrushes. At the far side, under the wooded Downside crowned by St. Martha’s, was a pale, shelterless mill of a ghostly bareness. The aspens were breaking into yellow-green leaves round about, especially one prone aspen on the left where a drain was belching furious, tawny water into the stream, and shaking the spears of the bulrushes.

As I went on towards Chilworth, gorse was blossoming on the banks of the road. Behind the blossom rose up the masses of hillside wood, now scarcely interrupted save by a few interspaces of lawn-like grass; and seated at the foot of all this oak and pine were the Chilworth powder mills. Two centuries have earned them nobody’s love or reverence; for there is something inhuman, diabolical, in permitting the union which makes these unrelated elements more powerful than any beast, crueller than any man.

Crossing the little railway from the mills, I came in sight of the Hog’s Back, by which I must go to Farnham. That even, straight ridge pointing westward, and commanding the country far away on either side, must have had a road along it since man went upright, and must continue to have one so long as it is a pleasure to move and to use the eyes together. It is a road fit for the herald Mercury and the other gods, because it is as much in heaven as on earth. The road I was on, creeping humbly and crookedly to avoid both the steepness of the hills and the wetness of the valley, was by comparison a mole run. Between me and the Hog’s Back flowed the Wey, and as the Tillingbourne approached it the valley spread out and flattened into Shalford’s long, wet common. My road crossed the common, a rest for gypsies and their ponies. Shalford village also is on the flat, chiefly on the right hand side of the road, nearer the hill, and away from the river, so that its outlook over the levels gives it a resemblance to a seaside village. Instead of the sea it had formerly a fair ground of a hundred and forty acres. Its inn is the “Queen Victoria”—charmless name.

To avoid the Wey and reach Guildford, which is mainly on this side of the water, I had to turn sharp to the right at Shalford, and to penetrate, along with the river, the hills which I had been following. Within half a mile of Guildford I was at the point where the Pilgrim’s Way, travelling the flank of these hills, descends towards the Wey and the Hog’s Back opposite. A small but distinct hill, with a precipitous, sandy face, rises sheer out of the far side of the river where the road once crossed. The silver-gray square of the ruins of St. Catherine’s Chapel tops the cliff. The river presently came close to my bank; the road climbed to avoid it, and brought me into Guildford by Quarry Road, well above the steep-built, old portion of the town and its church and rookery sycamores, though below the castle.

The closed shops, plate glass, and granite roadway of the High Street put the worst possible appearance on the rain that suddenly poured down at six. A motor car dashed under the “Lion” arch for shelter. The shop doorways were filled by foot-passengers. The plate glass, the granite, and the rain rebounding from it and rushing in two torrents down the steep gutters, made a scene of physical and spiritual chill under a sky that had now lost even the pretence to possess a sun. I had thought not to decide for or against going on to Farnham that night until I had drunk tea. But having once sat in a room—not of the “Jolly Butcher,” but a commercial temperance hotel—where I could only hear the rain falling from the sky and dripping from roofs, I glided into the resolution to spend the night there. A fire was lit; the servant stood a poker vertically against the grate to make it burn; and, after some misgivings, it did burn. The moon was mounting the clear east, and Venus stood with Orion in the west above a low, horizontal ledge of darkest after-sunset cloud. There could not have been a better time for those ten miles to Farnham; but I did not go. Not until after supper did I go out to look at the night I had lost, the cold sea of sky, the large bright moon, the white stars over the shimmering roofs, and the yellow street lamps and window panes of Guildford. I walked haphazard, now to the right, now to the left, often by narrow passages and dark entries. I skirted the railings of the gardens which have been made out of the castle site, the square ivy-patched keep, the dry moat full of sycamores; and hereby was a kissing corner. I crossed Quarry Road and went down Mill Lane to the “Miller’s Arms,” the water-works, and the doubled Wey roaring in turbid streams. A footbridge took me to Mill Mead, the “Britannia,” and the faintly nautical cottages that look, over a gas-lit paved space, at the river and the timber sheds of the other bank. The dark water, the dark houses, the silvered, wet, moonlit streets, called for some warm, musical life in contrast. But except that a sacred concert was proceeding near the market place, there was nothing like it accessible. Many couples hurried along: at corners here and there a young man, or two young men, talked to a girl. The inns were not full, too many travellers having been discouraged. I had the temperance commercial hotel to myself, but for two men who had walked from London and had no conversation left in them, as was my case also. I dallied alternately with my maps and with the pictures on the wall. One of these I liked, a big square gloomy canvas, where a dark huntsman of Byron’s time, red-coated and clean-shaven, turned round on his horse to cheer the hounds, one of them almost level with him, glinting pallid through the mist of time, two others just pushing their noses into the picture; it had a background of a dim range of hills and a spire. The whole picture was as dim as memory, but more powerful to recall the nameless artist and nameless huntsman than that cross at Leatherhead.

III.
GUILDFORD TO DUNBRIDGE.

Cocks crowing and wheels thundering on granite waked me at Guildford soon after six. I was out at seven, after paying 3s. 6d. for supper and bed: breakfast I was to have at Farnham. I have often fared as well as I did that night at a smaller cost, and worse at a larger. At Guildford itself, for example, I went recently into a place of no historic interest or natural beauty, and greenly consented to pay 3s. for a bed, although the woman, in answer to my question, said that the charge for supper and breakfast would be according to what I had. What I had for supper was two herrings and bread and butter, and a cup of coffee afterwards; for breakfast I had bacon and bread and tea. The supper cost 1s. 6d., exclusive of the coffee; the breakfast cost 1s. 6d. exclusive of the tea. Nor did these charges prevent the boots, who had not cleaned my boots, from hanging round me at parting, as if I had been his long-lost son.

The beautiful, still, pale morning was as yet clouded by the lightest of white silk streamers. The slates glimmered with yesterday’s rain in the rising sun. It was too fine, too still, too sunny, but the castle jackdaws rejoiced in it, crying loudly in the sycamores, on the old walls, or high in air. By the time I was beginning to mount the Hog’s Back, clouds not of silk were assembling. They passed away; others appeared, but the rain was not permitted to fall. Many miles of country lay cold and soft, but undimmed, on both hands. On the north it was a mostly level land where hedgerow trees and copses, beyond the first field or two, made one dark wood to the eye, but rising to the still darker heights of Bisley and Chobham on the horizon, and gradually disclosing the red settlements of Aldershot and Farnborough, and the dark high land of Bagshot. On the south at first I could see the broken ridge of Hindhead, Blackdown, and Olderhill, and through the gap a glimpse of the Downs; then later the piny country which culminates in the dome of Crooksbury Hill; and nearer at hand a lower but steeply rising and falling region of gorse, bracken, and heather intermingled with ploughland of almost bracken colour, and with the first hop gardens. Both the level-seeming sweep on the north and the hills of the south, clear as they were in that anxious light, were subject to the majestic road on the Hog’s Back. A mile out of Guildford the road is well upon the back, and for five or six miles it runs straight, yet not too straight, with slight change of altitude, yet never flat, and for the most part upon the very ridge—the topmost bristles—of the Hog’s Back. The ridge, in fact, has in some parts only just breadth enough to carry the road, and the land sinks away rapidly on both hands, giving the traveller the sensation of going on the crest of a stout wall, surveying his immense possessions northward and southward. The road has a further advantage that would be great whatever its position, but on this ridge is incalculable. It is bordered, not by a hedge, but by uneven and in places bushy wastes, often as wide as a field. The wastes, of course, are divided from the cultivated slopes below by hedges, but either these are low, as on the right, or they are irregularly expanded into thickets of yew and blackthorn, and even into beech plantations, as on the left. Whoever cares to rides or walks here instead of on the dust. A goat or two were feeding here. There was, and there nearly always is, an encampment of gypsies. The telegraph posts and the stout, three-sided, old, white milestones stand here. The telegraph posts, in one place, for some distance alternate with low, thick yew trees. I liked those telegraph posts, businesslike and mysterious, and their wires that are sufficient of themselves to create the pathetic fallacy. None the less, I liked the look of the gypsies camping under them. If they were not there, in fact, they would have to be invented. They are at home there. See them at nightfall, with their caravans drawn up facing the wind, and the men by the half-door at the back smoking, while the hobbled horses are grazing and the children playing near. The children play across the road, motor cars or no motor cars, laughing at whoever amuses them. There were two caravans at the highest point near Puttenham, where the ridge is so narrow that the roadside thicket is well below the road, and I saw clear to Hindhead: in another place there were two antique, patched tents on hoops.

The wind was now strong in my face again. But it did not rain, and at moments the sun had the power to warm. There was not a moment when I had not a lark singing overhead. On the right hand slope, which is more gradual than that to the left, men were rolling some grass fields, harrowing others; lower down they were ploughing. Men were beginning to work among the hop poles on the left. The oaks in the woods there were each individualized, and had a smoky look which they would not have had in Summer, Autumn, or Winter.

Houses very seldom intrude on the waste, and there are few near it. On the south side two or three big houses had been built so as to command Hindhead, etc., and a board directed me to the “Jolly Farmer” at Puttenham, but no inn was visible till I came to the “Victory,” which was well past the half-way mark to Farnham. The north side showed not more than a cottage or two, until I began to descend towards Farnham and came to a villa which had trimmed the waste outside its gates and decorated it with the inscription, “Keep off the grass.” Going downhill was too much of a pleasure for me to look carefully at Runfold, though I noticed another “Jolly Farmer” there, and a “Princess Royal,” with the date 1819. This not very common sign put into my head the merry song about the “brave Princess Royal” that set sail from Gravesend—

“On the tenth of December and towards the year’s end,”

and met a pirate, who asked them to “drop your main topsail and heave your ship to,” but got the answer,—

“We’ll drop our main topsail and heave our ship to,

But that in some harbour, not alongside of you.

So we hoisted the royals and set the topsail,

And the brave Princess Royal soon showed them her tail:

And we went a-cruising, and we went a-cruising,

And we went a-cruising, all on the salt seas.”

A PASSING STORM

near St. Cross, Winchester.

The good tune and merry words lasted me down among the market gardens and florists’ plantations, past the “Shepherd and Flock” at the turning to Moor Park, to the Wey again, and the first oast-house beside it, and so into Farnham at a quarter to nine, which I felt to be breakfast time.

While I drank my coffee the rising wind slammed a door and the first shower passed over. The sun shone for me to go to the “Jolly Farmer” across the Wey, in a waterside street of cottages and many inns, such as the “Hop Bag,” the “Bird in Hand,” and the “Lamb.” The “Jolly Farmer,” Cobbett’s birthplace, a small inn standing back a little, with a flat black and white front, was labelled “Cobbett’s Birthplace,” in letters as big as are usually given to the name of a brewer. It is built close up against a low sandy bank, which continues above the right shore of the Wey, somewhat conspicuously, for miles. Behind the “Jolly Farmer” this bank is a cliff, hollowed out into caves (no one knows how old, or whether made by Druids or smugglers), and overgrown by bushes and crowned by elms full of rooks’ nests. The whole of this waterside is attractive, rustic, but busy. The Wey is already a strong stream there, and timber yards and warehouses abut on it. A small public garden occupies the angle made by one of its willowy bends.

Farnham West Street was for the moment warm in the sun as I walked slowly between its shops to where the perched brick fronts of decent old houses were scarcely interrupted by a quiet shop or two and the last inns, the “Rose and Thistle” and the “Holly Bush.” It is one of those streets in which a hundred houses have been welded into practically one block. There are some very old houses, some that are old, and some not very old, but all together compose one long, uneven wall of rustic urbanity. Castle Street is entirely different. It takes its name from the Bishop of Winchester’s castle, a palace of old red brick and several cedars standing at its upper end. Being about three times as broad as West Street, it is fit to be compared for breadth with the streets of Marlborough, Wootton Bassett, or Epsom. Most of the houses are private and not big, of red or of plastered or whitened brick; but there is a baker’s shop, a “Nelson’s Arms,” and a row of green-porched alms-houses. At the far end the street rises and curves a little to the left, and is narrowed by the encroachment of front gardens only possessed by the houses at that point. A long flight of steps above this curve ascends a green slope of arum and ivy and chestnut trees, past an old episcopal fruit wall, to a rough-cast gateway, with clock and belfry, and beyond that, the palace and two black, many-storied cedars towering at its front door.

I looked in vain for a statue of Cobbett in Farnham. Long may it be before there is one, for it will probably be bad and certainly unnecessary. So long as “Rural Rides” is read he needs not to share that kind of resurrection of the just with Queen Anne and the late Dukes of Devonshire and of Cambridge. The district has bred yet another man who combines the true countryman and the writer. I mean, of course, George Bourne, author of “The Bettesworth Book,” a volume which ought to go on to the most select shelf of country books, even beside those of White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hudson, and Burroughs. Bettesworth was a Surrey labourer, a neighbour and workman of the author’s. He was an observant and communicative man: his employer took notes from time to time, and the book is mainly a record of conversations. George Bourne gives a brief setting to the old man’s words, yet a sufficient one. Pain and sorrow are not absent, and afar off we see a gray glimpse of the workhouse; but the whole is joyful. Even when Bettesworth “felt a bit Christmassy” there is no melancholy; his head merely seems “all mops and brooms.” His wife tells him that he has been laughing in his sleep. “I was always laughing, then,” he says, “until I was sore all round wi’ it.” We have Bettesworth’s own words in most cases, and George Bourne never interferes except to help. There is no insipid contrast with the outer world, though here and there we have an echo from it; we hear of railways as not particularly convenient, and a dull way of travelling; and of cut-purses, “got up they was, ye know, reg’lar fly-looking blokes, like gentlemen.” Nothing is omitted but what had to be. Bettesworth cleaned cesspools at times, and the best things in the book centre round his “excellent versatility in usefulness.” Well-sinking, reaping, lawn-mowing, pole-pulling in the hop garden, mending of roofs and steeples, and all the glorious activities connected with horses, had come into his work: as for adventure, he drove his first pair of cart horses from Staines to Smithfield Market. He had been a wanderer, too. During a long absence from friends he wrote to a brother, enclosing a gift; but on the way to the post he met an acquaintance, “and I ast’n if he’d ’ave a drink. So when he says yes, I took the letter an’ tore out the dollar an’ chucked the letter over the hedge. An’ we went off an’ ’ad a bottle o’ rum wi’ this dollar. An’ that’s all as they ever heerd o’ me for seven year.”

But the conversations themselves were held while Bettesworth was laying turf, or during the quite genial fatigue following a fifteen-hour day. “Laying Turf” is one of the most charming pieces in the world. The old steeple-mender, reaper, and carter was laying turf under continuous rain and in an uncomfortable attitude, and made the unexpected comment: “Pleasant work this. I could very well spend my time at it, with good turfs.”

“The Bettesworth Book” appeared in 1901. “Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer,” the record of Bettesworth’s last years—1892–1905—appeared in 1907. At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author. But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously emerging, truthful undoubtedly, subtle, not easy to understand, which raises George Bourne to a high place among observers. Apart from his observation, too, he shows himself a man with a ripe and generous, if staid, view of life, and a writer capable of more than accurate writing: witness his picture of frozen rime on telegraph wires, of Bettesworth’s “polling beck” or potato fork, and phrases like this: “Near the beans there were brussels sprouts, their large leaves soaked with colour out of the clouded day.”

Bettesworth had fought in the Crimea, and during sixty years had been active unceasingly over a broad space of English country—Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire—always out of doors. His memory was good, his eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual, “with swift realistic touch, convincingly true;” so that a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result. The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. He lived in a parish where people of urban habits were continually taking the place of the older sort who dropped out, but he had himself been labourer, soldier, “all sorts of things; but ... first and last by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England than that in which we are living now,” and perhaps unconscious of the change since the days when he saw four men in a smithy making an axe-head: “Three with sledge-’ammers, and one with a little ’ammer, tinkin’ on the anvil.... There was one part of making a axe as they’d never let anybody see ’em at.”

The talk, and George Bourne’s comments reveal this man’s way of thinking and speaking, his lonely thoughts, and his attitude in almost every kind of social intercourse. They show his physical strength, his robust and gross enjoyment, his isolation, his breeding and independence, his tenderness without pity, his courage, his determination to endure. No permissible amount of quotation can explain the subtle appeal of his talk, for example, whilst turf-laying,—

“Half unawares it came home to me, like the contact of the garden mould, and the smell of the earth, and the silent saturation of the cold air. You could hardly call it thought—the quality in this simple prattling. Our hands touching the turfs had no thought either; but they were alive for all that; and of such a nature was the life in Bettesworth’s brain, in its simple touch upon the circumstances of his existence. The fretful echoes men call opinions did not sound in it; clamour of the daily press did not disturb its quiet; it was no bubble puffed out by learning, nor indeed had it any of the gracefulness which some mental life takes from poetry and art; but it was still a genuine and strong elemental life of the human brain that during those days was my companion. It seemed as if something very real, as if the true sound of the life of the village had at last reached my dull senses.”

It will now reach duller senses than George Bourne’s. No one has told better how a peasant who has not toned his other virtues with thrift is deserted in the end by God and even the majority of men. The “Memoirs” are shadowed from the first by the helplessness of Bettesworth’s epileptic wife. The whole of his last year was a dimly lighted, solitary, manly agony.... Now, a statue of Frederick Bettesworth might well be placed at the foot of Castle Street, to astonish and annoy, if a sculptor could be found.

As I was passing the “Jolly Sailor” and its jolly signboard, a gypsy, a sturdy, black-haired, and brown-faced woman, was coming into Farnham carrying a basket packed tight with daffodils. The sun shone and was warm, but the low road was still wet. It was the Pilgrim’s Way now, not merely a parallel road such as I had been on since Dorking. For some miles it kept the Wey in sight, and over beyond the river, that low wall and ledge of sand, used by the railway, crested with oak and pine here and there, and often dappled on its slope with gorse. The land on my right was different, being largely sodden, bare, arable, with elms. But it was a pleasure to ride and walk and always to see the winding river and its willows, and that even green terrace now near, now far. Looking across at this scene were a number of detached houses, old and new, at good intervals along the right hand side of the road: some of them could see also the long Alice Holt woods of oaks and larches, the tips of certain small groups of trees gilded fitfully by the sunshine. At Willey Mill, soon after leaving Farnham, the road actually touched the river, and horses can walk through it parallel to the road and cool their feet; and just past this, I entered Hampshire. More often the river was midway between my road and the terrace, touching an old farm-house of brick and timber in the plashy meadows, or turning a mill with a white plunge of water under sycamores. But the gayest and most springlike sign was the fresh whitewash on every fruit tree in an orchard by the wayside; it suggested a festival. The poles were being set up in the hop gardens. The hedges enclosing them had been allowed to grow up to a great height for a screen against wind, and to make a diaphanous green wall. Many were the buildings related to hops, whose mellow brickwork seemed to have been stained by a hundred harvests.

Bentley, the first village in Hampshire, seemed hardly more than a denser gathering, and all on the right hand, of the houses that had been scattered along since Farnham, with the addition of two inns and of a green which a brooklet crosses and turns into a pond at the road’s edge. After Bentley the road ascended, the place of houses was taken by trees, chiefly lines of beeches connected with several embowered mansions at some distance, one of pale stone, one of dark brick. Several rookeries inhabited these beeches. Froyle House, perhaps the chief in this neighbourhood, stood near where the road is highest, and yet closest to the river—a many-gabled pale house next to a red church tower among elms and black-flamed cypresses. Up to the church and house a quarter of a mile of grass mounted, with some isolated ancient thorns and many oaks, which in one spot near the road gathered together into a loose copse. The park itself ran with not too conspicuous or regular a boundary into hop gardens and ploughland. A low wall on a bank separated it from the road, and where a footpath had to pass the wall the stile was a slab of stone pierced by two pairs of foot-holes, approached up the bank by three stone steps. It was here, and at eleven, that I first heard the chiffchaff saying, “Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff!” A streamlet darted out of the park towards the Wey, and on the other side of the road, and below it, had to itself a little steep coomb of ash trees. An oak had been felled on the coomb side, and a man was clearing the brushwood round it, but the small bird’s double note, almost as regular as the ticking of a clock, though often coming to an end on the first half, sounded very clear in the coomb. He sang as he flitted among the swaying ash tops in that warm, cloudy sun. I thought he sang more shrilly than usual, something distractedly. But I was satisfied. Nothing so convinces me, year after year, that Spring has come and cannot be repulsed, though checked it may be, as this least of songs. In the blasting or dripping weather which may ensue, the chiffchaff is probably unheard; but he is not silenced. I heard him on March 19 when I was fifteen, and I believe not a year has passed without my hearing him within a day or two of that date. I always expect him and always hear him. Not all the blackbirds, thrushes, larks, chaffinches, and robins can hide the note. The silence of July and August does not daunt him. I hear him yearly in September, and well into October—the sole Summer voice remaining save in memory. But for the wind I should have heard him yesterday. I went on more cheerfully, as if each note had been the hammering of a tiny nail into Winter’s coffin.

My road now had the close company of the railway, which had crossed the river. The three ran side by side on a strip not more than a quarter of a mile in breadth; but the river, small, and not far from its source, was for the most part invisible behind the railway. Close to the railway bank some gypsies had pitched a tent, betrayed by the scarlet frock of one of the children. But in a moment scarlet abounded. The hounds crossing road and railway in front of me were lost to sight for several minutes before they reappeared on the rising fields towards Binsted Wyck. The riders, nearly all in scarlet, kept coming in for ten minutes or so from all hands, down lanes, over sodden arable land, between hop gardens, past folded sheep. Backwards and forwards galloped the scarlet before the right crossing of the railway was taken. The fox died in obscurity two miles away.

How warm and sweet the sun was can be imagined when I say that it made one music of the horn-blowing, the lambs’ bleating, the larks’ singing, as I sat looking at Bonham’s Farm. This plain old brick house, with fourteen windows—two dormers—symmetrically placed, fronted the road down two or three hundred yards of straight, hedged cart track. It had spruce firs on the left, on the right some beeches and a long barn roof stained ochre by lichens.

Then I came to Holybourne. It is a village built in a parallelogram formed by a short section of the main road, two greater lengths of parallel by-roads, and a cross road connecting these two. Froyle was of an equally distinct type, lying entirely on a by-road parallel to the main road, near the church and great house, as Bentley lay entirely on one side of the main road, half a mile from its church. Holybourne Church—Holy Rood—stands at the corner where the short cross road joins one of the side roads; where it joins the other is the Manor Farm. I turned up by the “White Hart” and the smithy and chestnut with which the village begins, and found the church. It is a flint and stone one, with a moderately sharp shingled spire that spreads out at the base. On the side away from the main road, that is northward, lies ploughland mixed with copse rising to the horizon, but, near by, a hop garden, an oast-house, a respectable, square, ivy-mantled farm-house possessing a fruit wall, a farmyard occupied by black pigs, and a long expanse of corrugated iron, roofing old whitestone sheds and outbuildings. Southward is a chalk-bottomed pond of clear water, containing two sallow islets, and bordered, where it touches the road, by chestnuts, a lime, and an ivy-strangled spruce fir. This pond is not cut off in any way from the churchyard and all its tombstones of Lillywhites, Warners, Mays, Fidlers, Knights, Inwoods, and Burninghams. In the church I saw chiefly two things: the wall tablet to “George Penton, Brassfounder, Member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, who resided in New Street Square, and whose remains were deposited in St. Bride’s parish church, London,” and a slender window decorated with tiny flowered discs of alternating blue and orange.

Holybourne’s shrubberies, and the beeches and elms of an overhanging rookery, shadowed and quieted the main road as if it had been private. Moreover, there was still some sun to help dapple the dust with light as well as leaf shadow. Nor was the wind strong, and what there was helped me.

Before the village had certainly ended, Alton had begun. Its grandest building was its first—the workhouse. It is an oblong brick building lying back behind its gardens, with a flat ivied front which is pierced by thirty-three windows, including dormers, placed symmetrically about a central door, and an oval stone tablet bearing the figures “1795.” It smacked of 1795 pure and simple; of the England which all the great men of the nineteenth century were born in and nearly all hated. Its ivy, its plain, honest face, and substantial body of mellow red brick, and that date, 1795, gave the workhouse a genial tranquillity which no doubt was illusory. From there to the end of Alton is one not quite straight or quite level street—Normandy Street and High Street—altogether a mile of houses and of shops (including the “Hop Poles,” the “Barley Mow,” and the “French Horn”) that supply everything a man needs, with the further advantage that if a man wants his hair cut he can have it done by Julius Cæsar: the town brews beer, and even makes paper. It is a long and a low town, and the main street has no church in it until it begins to emerge on to the concluding green, called Robin Hood Butts.

I could have gone as well through Medstead as through Ropley to Alresford, but I went by the Ropley way, and first of all through Chawton. Here the road forks at a smithy, among uncrowded thatched cottages and chestnuts and beeches. The village is well aware of the fact that Jane Austen once dwelt in a house at the fork there, opposite the “Grey Friar.” I took the right hand road and had a climb of two miles, from 368 feet above sea level to 642 feet. This road ascended, parallel to the railway, in a straight, narrow groove, and was fringed on both sides for some distance, up to and past the highest point, by hedgeless copses of oak and beech, hazel, thorn, and ivy. An old chalk pit among the trees had been used for depositing pots and pans, but otherwise the copses might never have been entered except by the chiffchaff that sang there, and seemed to own them. Once out in the open at Four Marks, I had spread out around me a high but not hilly desolation of gray grass, corrugated iron bungalows, and chicken-runs. I glided as fast as possible away from this towards the Winchester Downs beyond, not pausing even at the tenth milestone from Winchester to enjoy again that brief broadening on either hand of the rough wayside turf, sufficient to make a fair ground. Past the “Chequers” at Ropley Dean, and again past the “Anchor” towards Bishop’s Sutton, there are similar and longer broadenings; and on one of these two tramps were lying asleep, the one hid by hat and clothes, the other with clear outstanding pale profile, hands clasped over the fifth rib, and feet stuck up, like a carved effigy. I was as glad to see them sleeping in the sun as to hear the larks singing. I would have done the same if I had been somebody else.

Bishop’s Sutton, the next village, resembles Holybourne in the shrubberies with which it hushes the road. Passing the “Plough” and the “Ship” (kept by a man with the great Hampshire name of Port), I went into the church, which was decorated by the memorial tablets of people named Wright and an eighteenth century physician named William Cowper, and by daffodils and primroses arranged in moss and jam jars. Many dead flowers were littered about the floor. The churchyard was better, for it had a tree taller than the tower, and another lying prone alongside the road for children to play on, and very few tombstones. Of these few, one recorded the deaths of three children in 1827–1831, and furthermore thus boldly baffled the infidel,—

“Bold infidelity, turn pale and die.

Beneath this sod three infants’ ashes lie.

Say, are they lost or sav’d?

If Death’s by sin, they sinn’d, for they lie here:

If Heaven’s by works, in Heaven they can’t appear.

Ah, reason, how depraved!

Revere the Bible’s sacred page, for there the knot’s untied.”

The children were Oakshotts, a Hampshire name borne by a brook and a hanger near Hawkley.

The telegraph wires were whining as if for rain as I neared Alresford, having on my right hand the willowy course of the young Alre, and before me its sedgy, wide waters, Old Alresford pond. The road became Alresford by being lined for a third of a mile downhill by cottages, inns, and shops. This is the whole town, except for one short, very broad turning half way along at the highest point, and opposite where the church stands bathed in cottages.

Alresford is an excellent little town, sad-coloured but not cold, and very airy. For not only does the main street descend from this point steeply west towards Winchester, but the broad street also descends northward, so that over the tops of the houses crossing the bottom of it and over the hidden Alre, are seen the airy highlands of Abbotsstone, Swarraton, and Godsfield. The towered flint church and the churchyard make almost as much of a town as Alresford itself, so numerous are the tombs of all the Wools, Keanes, Corderoys, Privetts, Cameses, Whitears, Norgetts, Dykeses, scattered among many small yew trees. At one side stand many headstones of French officers who had served Napoleon, but died in England about the time of Waterloo—Lhuille, Lavan, Garnier, Riouffe, and Fournier. Inside the church one of the most noticeable things is a tablet to one John Lake, who was born in 1691, died in 1759, and lies near that spot, waiting for the day of judgment. “Qualis erat,” says the inscription, “dies iste indicabit:” (“What manner of man he was that day will make known.”) The writer of these words saved himself from lies and from trouble.

I looked in vain for any one bearing the name of the poet who praised Alresford pond—George Wither. Or, rather, he praised it as it was in the days when Thetis resorted thither and played there with her attendant fishes, and received crowns of flowers and beech leaves from the land nymphs at eve:—

“For pleasant was that pool, and near it then

Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen.

It was not overgrown with boist’rous sedge,

Nor grew there rudely then along the edge

A bending willow nor a prickly bush,

Nor broad-leaf’d flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush;

But here, well order’d, was a grove with bowers:

There grassy plots set round about with flowers.

Here you might through the water see the land

Appear, strow’d o’er with white or yellow sand.

Yon, deeper was it; and the wind by whiffs

Would make it rise and wash the little cliffs,

On which oft pluming sat, unfrightened than,

The gaggling wildgoose and the snow-white swan:

With all those flocks of fowls that to this day

Upon those quiet waters breed and play.

For though those excellences wanting be

Which once it had, it is the same that we