Penton Hook is quite peculiar. To a select little coterie of people it is the place on the river, but to hundreds of others it is not known at all. To its own manifest advantage it is off the "hard high road," and the scorchers and the bounders, and the multitude generally, fly by within a comparatively short distance, little knowing what they have missed. But one or two of the favoured few turn down to quiet little Laleham, and The trees near the bungalows, and those that fringe the meadows near, are not pollarded; there is space between their tall stems. The short grass, gemmed with pink-tipped daisies, can be seen everywhere, and there is air, and freshness, and openness for everyone. The white paint of the bungalows and their neat green or pink roofs, the rows of geraniums, roses, and other flowers carefully kept and tended, add touches of gaiety and brightness. There are three weirs, for the river here makes the neatest horse-shoe in its whole length, and the authorities have cut through the neck of land, so that the greater part of the stream goes rioting and tumbling in joyous confusion beneath the great new weir, provided with a pent-house roof, under which it is always cool on the hottest summer day, with transparent reflections dancing on the wall and a ripple and splash below. The second weir, a mere tumbling-weir, is only a few yards At Penton it should be always summer, with dog-roses and sweetbriar, with placid red cows grazing on the tender grass, with boats tethered in the lazy current round the bend of the Hook. An uncommonly good place for fishing it is, this Hook, as the kingfishers have found out, for they are yearly increasing, and apparently do not mind the gay tide of summer company that invades their haunts. Right down on the banks near the lock one pair nested this year. No steamers churn up the waters and frighten the The Abbey river starts away on its own account on the far side of the Hook, and begins its short course of about a couple of miles, to fall into the Thames again at Chertsey. It used to be possible to get up it in a boat, but now it is barred. However, visitors have nothing to complain of, for the meadows around are singularly open to them, and the place is not hedged about with restrictions as are so many river resorts. Numbers of people come down to picnic, and it is no uncommon sight to see quite a row of motors outside the lock-keeper's house, while footman or chauffeur carries across the luncheon hampers to what was once a peninsula but is now an island. Tradesmen's carts come round too, finding in the swallow-colony quite enough demand to make it worth their while; and year by year the bungalows grow. A whole new piece of meadow, hitherto osier bed, is even now going to be devoted to them. "Why, I get as many as twenty to thirty applications for land every week," says the lock-keeper. It is to be hoped Penton |