THE chief river flowing through Surrey is one which Pope shows himself not infallible in mislabelling “the chalky Wey that pours a milky wave.” But as the Amazon is not altogether a Brazilian stream, so the Wey has its rise in other counties; and still further to compare great and small, there might be some question as to its main source. One branch springs on Blackdown in Sussex, flowing round Hindhead; another comes less deviously from beyond the Hampshire Alton, rising beside White’s Selborne. The latter has more honour in maps, so let us take this up where it enters a bulging south-western corner of Surrey near Farnham’s pleasant market-town, whose antiquity is vouched for by a scattering of old houses and cobbled ways about the long main street. Here the Wey crooks through green meadows, on which oast-houses and stacked hop-poles, if not a show of trailing vines, reveal the rich gault soil making this corner of the country an oasis of hop cultivation, especially in the woodbine variety. It is but natural, then, that ale should be a renowned product of Farnham, which has also, at the outlying village of Wrecclesham, a notable manufactory of green pottery known as Farnham ware. If I am not mistaken, the hop-fields appear to have shrunk of late years hereabouts; but still Farnham would make a scene for that story of a learned stranger preaching on the evidences of design as evinced in the study of optics, and being duly complimented by the churchwarden: “capital sermon of yours, sir, about the ’opsticks; we mostly calls ’em ’oppoles in these parts; but we knew what you meant!”

The lion of the place is its Castle, originally built in Stephen’s troubled days, and now making a lordly abode for the Bishops of Winchester. Its most prominent appearance in our annals is during the Civil War, when it was held for the Parliament by George Wither, and for the King by a more loyal bard, Sir John Denham, but was partly blown up by the namesake of another poet, Sir William Waller; then it came to be dismantled under Cromwell. Restored and modernised, it still preserves the ivied Keep enshrining a flower garden, Fox’s Tower, the stately hall, the ancient servants’ hall and kitchen, the chapel with its rich carvings, said to be by Grinling Gibbons, and other old features to put a prelate in no danger of forgetting his historic dignity. The park, with its elm avenue, open to the public, is a noble expanse sloping up towards Hungry Hill, by which one passes from this home of peaceful state to the dusty purlieus of Aldershot Camp.

Below the Castle, on the opposite side of the high-road, stands the Parish Church, among whose memorials the most interesting is the tomb of William Cobbett beside the porch. Inside the building also is a tablet in his honour, as could hardly have been foreseen by that porcupinish Tory-democrat, whose quills were so readily roused at the very name of a parson. He is believed, not without question, to have been born at the “Jolly Farmer” Inn, near the station; and he died at Normandy Farm, on the north side of the Hog’s Back. Amid his crabbed grumblings and cross-grained whims, his heart always warms at the recollection of boyish toils and pranks about Farnham, his early entrance on life as an unschooled bird-scarer, his games of rolling and sliding down the sandy sides of Crooksbury, his bird’s-nesting sport on its tall trees, his trotting after the hounds, and his malicious trick of drawing a red herring across a hare’s scent to revenge himself for a cut from the huntsman’s whip.

Another memory honoured at Farnham is that of Augustus Toplady, author of “Rock of Ages,” better known than “Rural Rides,” who was born here, 1740. Izaak Walton was a sojourner at the Castle, and must have had many a day on the Wey, as in his old age on the Itchen. A writer of our own time connected with Farnham was “Edna Lyall,” more than one of whose novels contains sympathetic descriptions of the scenery around “Firdale,” the quiet market-town that “wound its long street of red-roofed houses along a sheltered valley, in between fir-crowned heights.”

But more resounding names are familiar in this neighbourhood. Just outside of the town, down the Wey, lies Moor Park, the seat of Sir William Temple, whose saturnine dependant Swift here ate the bitter bread of servitude, and at least began A Tale of a Tub, that would make such an inspiring model for Cobbett, the gardener’s boy, who on his runaway trip to Kew spent all the coppers he had left on a copy of it, curiosity being for once stronger than hunger. For a time Moor Park was turned into a Hydropathic Establishment. A recent owner tried to shut up the old right of way through it, but was sturdily withstood by the Cobbetts of this generation; and one can walk unquestioned right beside the house and garden, where Temple’s heart is buried under a sundial; then on past the cavern keeping green the name of Mother Ludlam, a mistily white witch, whose caldron is still shown in Frensham Church. Thus may be reached the farther gate near the Wey, beside which a restored cottage is pointed out by vague tradition as the abode either of Swift or of Stella, or as their meeting-place.

Across the bridge here opens the gate of another park, in which are enclosed the remains of Waverley Abbey, the finest ecclesiastical ruins in Surrey, not very rich in such treasures. This was the first Cistercian monastery in England, whose scanty remains stand tangled in greenery, a beautiful sight, and still substantial enough to indicate its fallen grandeur. Recent excavations by the Surrey ArchÆological Society have been well rewarded. The eighteenth-century mansion kept the old monks’ garden, in which Cobbett worked as a boy, and got his fill of fruit, for, he says, the produce could never have been consumed unless the servants lent a mouth. A visitor to the neighbourhood was Sir Walter Scott, who carried away the name of Waverley as a fruitful seed. His famous novel has nothing of the Abbey save its name; but Sir Nigel, a lively work of one of our generation’s romancers, Sir A. Conan Doyle, has brought this skeleton of a great religious house to life for us as it was in Plantagenet days.

An active youth, like the hero of this tale, might have followed the windings of the Wey below Farnham, whence it sets out as with a bold design of tunnelling the Hog’s Back, but is content to turn away after piercing the railway. The heedful pedestrian had better not try to keep by its green banks. From Farnham station he has a pretty walk by a road that in half an hour brings him to the Waverley end of the bridge. For the longer way to the other side, he takes the Hog’s Back road, turning off on a byway marked “Moor Park.” Above this left bank, opposite Waverley Abbey, rise the well-wooded slopes of Crooksbury, that to Cobbett’s untravelled eyes seemed such

a mighty mountain; but he may often have scampered up it in a few minutes. From the top there is an open look-out upon the line of the Hog’s Back to the north; in other directions the view is much impeded by the tall trees, ranked in sharp lines, that from some points suggest a gigantic yew clipped to a pattern.

An hour’s walk by road through the foot of these woods would bring us back to the much meandering course of the river at Elstead, but at the cost of leaving out Tilford, where comes in the branch from Blackdown. One should by all means turn off on the right to this picturesque village, with its islanded green, its old bridges, and its “King’s Oak,” reputed as marking the boundary of the Abbey lands in Stephen’s reign. Such great age for this landmark has been questioned, but it shows so plainly the burden of time that a colleague and successor has been provided which will authentically chronicle the date of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Tilford Church, not very attractive outside, has a reredos in memory of Charlotte Smith, that now forgotten novelist, who died a century ago at Tilford House, said to have been known to another author still well remembered in nurseries, Dr. Watts.

From Tilford open beautiful rambles by Frensham Ponds on to the heaths of Hindhead, also to be gained from Elstead by way of Thursley and the Punch Bowl. On the other side of the river, fine commons rise up to the Hog’s Back. Between these swelling and bristling heights, we follow the green valley of the Wey, that below Elstead again ties itself into knots of vagary, then beyond the Somerset Bridge begins to behave more prettily as it enters the park of Peperharow. To the left side stands Lord Midleton’s mansion, near the Church, restored from the designs of Pugin, and enriched with interior ornamentation that make it one of the finest in this part of Surrey. On the other side, at the south edge of the Park, in Oxenford Farm, which keeps its fragment of real antiquity, Pugin reproduced an old English grange; and not far off the same architect built a shrine for Bonfield Well, one of old medical repute. As may be supposed from the fact of a parish church standing in the middle of this demesne, there is a public way through it, coming out at the village of Eashing, where one should not neglect to visit the picturesque old bridge, now guarded against parochial vandalism by the National Trust.

The Godalming high-road, running by the south side of Peperharow, here deserts the Wey valley. Another road, crossing at Eashing, mounts up by the fine modern Church of Shackleford and over the heights of Hurtmore, to come down again to Godalming by the Charterhouse School. But the pedestrian should by all means keep a path near the left side of the Wey, passing under a high bank to the bend where, along a charming little bit of woodland, cleft by green gulleys, is reached a closed-in swimming-place. Beyond this first sign of Godalming he gets on a road again, below that hillside suburb that has grown up about the transplanted Charterhouse School.

Thackeray’s contemporaries would stare to see their old “Smithfield” seminary in its picturesque new surroundings, the chief buildings set on a hill, where they form a conspicuous landmark. Only foreigners may need to be told how Charterhouse is one of our oldest “public hives of puerile resort” fixed in the heart of London till a generation ago, when it set the example of swarming into the country, as has since been the tendency of other great London schools. From the original building, now occupied by Merchant Taylors’ School, was brought bodily the old archway, carved with idle names, Thackeray’s among them; but the rest of the buildings wear an air of still spick-and-span dignity. The Chapel is worth seeing, and so is the Museum, which contains MSS. and drawings of Thackeray, letters of John Wesley and John Leech, and relics of the South African war given by another alumnus, General Baden Powell, who laid the foundation of the cloisters leading to the Chapel, as a memorial of old Carthusians not so fortunate in coming back from that war. Since the school was moved from London it has flourished well; for long under the head-mastership of Dr. Haig-Brown, of whom it is told that when the Mayor of Godalming, in proposing his health, complimented him as a combination of the fortiter in re with the suaviter in modo, this pained scholar professed to be overwhelmed not only by the quality but by the quantity of such praise.

With so scholastic a garrison in its citadel, Godalming may now stereotype its spelling and pronunciation. Pepys writes it as Godliman; and by old-fashioned folk in later days it was vernacularly spoken of somewhat as Gorlmin. The main part of the town lies out of sight behind the other bank, below which a trout of over 12 lbs. was caught not many years ago; but coarse fish are the more frequent spoil of local anglers. Across the bridge the road takes us by the Church and up into the High Street, showing old inns, picturesque seventeenth-century dwellings, and a quaint Market House near the upper end. Above the station, on the farther side of the line, is Westbrook, the home of General Oglethorpe, the philanthropic founder of Georgia, which he designed as a refuge for poverty-stricken Britons and persecuted German Protestants.

Americans will admire this as a good specimen of the English market-town, old enough to be mentioned in King Alfred’s will. England has hundreds of such towns to show, but not many of them are surrounded by so beautiful a mingling of meadowland and woodland, of hill, heath, and water scenery, often illustrated by Creswick, Hook, and Birket Foster. In all directions there are lovely walks and drives. The water tower over the Charterhouse shows the heights above the Wey, across which go roads to Loseley, Compton, and the Hog’s Back. On the opposite side a more distant tower rises upon a swell of woods, parks, and heaths, through which is the way to Bramley and Wonersh. The high-road southward for Portsmouth goes along a well-wooded valley to Milford, where it mounts the broken and pitted heaths for Hindhead, while the fork to the left follows the railway to Witley and Haslemere. Perhaps the finest walk in this direction is along the wooded heights to the east of the railway, where can be gained High Down Ball, a bare knoll looking over the woods; then by Hambledon Common one can turn down to Witley station in the valley, or keep the heights—

With such hints for divagation, let us resume our way down the river, henceforth navigable by barges and bridled by locks. Its course now is over the flat of Pease Marsh, towards the high chalk coast-line three or four miles ahead, shut in on either side by lower heights; and about half-way there opens a view of Guildford in the gap through which it will pass the Downs. On the right side was the junction of the now abandoned Wey and Arun Canal, its grass-grown trench making a peculiar and not unpleasing feature in the valley to the south-east, beneath the picturesque crests and clumps that hide Wonersh. The spire of Shalford Church welcomes us to another of the many “prettiest villages in Surrey,” where is the confluence of the Tillingbourne flowing down from Leith Hill between the chalk and the sand ridges, by whose varied heights we are now beautifully surrounded. We pass under St. Catherine’s Chapel at the crossing of the Pilgrims’ Way, which mounts among the woods to high-perched St. Martha’s, two or three miles on the right. There are roads on either side the river as it winds into the Downs, but the tow-path, unless in wet weather, makes the best way, bordered as it is by noble trees hanging over from private grounds. And so, beside a picturesque mill-race, we come into the lower end of Guildford, near the railway station, where the playful river for the first time finds itself imprisoned by buildings.

Guildford is Surrey’s county town, though so far shorn of its dignity that the County Council meets at Kingston, and much overgrown by Croydon, not to speak of the South London suburbs. There is no question as to its antiquity. It seems to have been a place of note in Saxon days; then, soon after the Conquest, a lordly castle was built here, that came to be visited by several of our Norman sovereigns. The town was so happy as not to figure much in history, and to this it may owe the preservation of so many old buildings. There is no southern county seat that looks its part better than Surrey’s, even since in our day its time-honoured features have been much overlaid by new ones, while everywhere it wears an air of roominess and thrivingness not always associated with the picturesque. Being only thirty miles from London, reached by three, nay four railway lines, it has become a favourite place of residence for business men and of retreat for officers, whose houses go on spreading up the dry and airy slopes of the Downs, above the old town rooted in the hollow of the Wey. Hence steeply-mounting, the broad main thoroughfare well displays its points of gabled roofs, projecting oriel windows and quaint doorways, more than one of the old houses, such as No. 25 and the Angel Inn with its vaults, being themselves notable sights. “Shall we go see the relics of this town?” If so, nearly all of them lie along or about its unique High Street, up which let us stroll, beginning from the bridge in the dip below the railway station, which is on the other side of the river.

Above the bridge stands up the tower of St. Nicholas, one of Guildford’s three parish churches,

which has been more than once rebuilt, but preserves the ancient Loseley Chapel, containing fine monuments of the More family. A little way up the High Street, to the right, in Quarry Street, will be found the old church of St. Mary’s, partly built of chalk mixed with flint and rubble, showing many remarkable points of interest and controversy for archÆologists, among them a bit claimed as Saxon, some grotesque corbels, and the vaulted roof of St. John’s Chapel, ornamented with grim mediÆval frescoes, which, like those in Chaldon Church, have become much obliterated, but it is now proposed to revive them. Their subject seems to be various marvels and horrors, mostly connected with legends of St. John; and they have been taken for the work of William of Florence, an artist employed by Henry III.

On the other side of High Street, a projecting clock face marks the Guildhall, dating from the end of the seventeenth century. This is a place to be visited, for behind its striking exterior are treasured several royal portraits, among them Charles II. and James II. by Lely, also some curious carvings on the mantelpiece of the Council Chamber, with a collection of standard measures of 1601 given by Queen Elizabeth. The woolsacks in the town arms commemorate a former renown for the making of cloth, also woven at surrounding villages, an industry said to have decayed through shortcomings on the part of the manufacturers. Aubrey asserts that Wonersh, now such a quiet village, flourished by making blue cloths for the Canary Islands, till the greedy clothiers hit on a trick of stretching out a web of 18 yards to 22 or 23, which led to their losing the market.

At the top of the ascent, on the right-hand side, is the High or Trinity Church, rebuilt in the eighteenth century, not very pleasing in itself, but enshrining some of the old memorials, as well as later ones. One of these, in all the absurdity of classical costume, shows the recumbent effigy of Speaker Onslow, who so long and so worthily filled the Chair of the House of Commons, and whose family are still Guildford’s great neighbours and patrons. The principal monument is the elaborate one to Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury (d. 1633), erected in the old church by his brother Sir Maurice Abbot, a Lord Mayor of London, to be beheld by Pepys among other tombs “kept mighty neat and clean with curtains before them.” This prelate stands high among the benefactors of his native town, though as a stalwart Puritan he has had hard things said against him. His chief claim to remembrance is as one of the body of scholars who translated or edited the authorised version of the Bible. Another of “that happy ternion of brothers,” as Fuller calls them, was Robert Abbot, who by long display of learning came to be Bishop of Salisbury—“but alas! he was hardly warm in his see before cold in his coffin.” As for George, the archbishop, “he did first creep, then run, then fly into preferment,” yet to have his wings painfully clipped after he had reached the highest post of the English Church. Shooting deer at Bramshill Park, near what was to be the rectory of his descendant, Charles Kingsley, this muscular Christian primate had the ill-luck to kill a keeper. Like the keen sportsman he was, King James made light of the accident, as one that might happen to any one; and a jury threw the blame on the victim; but the scandal was so great that it seemed well to grant a royal pardon to the right reverend manslayer. Even then, three Bishops-elect, Laud among them, declined to receive consecration at his blood-stained hands. The unfortunate Archbishop showed himself greatly concerned; he settled a pension on the man’s widow, who with such a dowry soon got another husband; and he kept a monthly fast for the rest of his life. The story goes that he never smiled again. For a time he went into retirement at the Hospital with which he had endowed Guildford, as an almshouse for the tradesmen whose decaying industry he strove to restore. But we hear of no remorse for what seems a darker offence than accidental manslaughter—the pains this Archbishop had taken, in 1611, to get two unfortunate men burned for their damnable guilt in disagreeing with him on a point of theology.

Abbot’s Hospital, standing just opposite the church, is one of the principal sights of the town, a building of stately picturesqueness that bettered its model, the similar institution founded by Archbishop Whitgift at Croydon. Passing through the noble archway adorned with the arms of Canterbury, and under the imposing tower with its domed turrets, the visitor finds himself back in a quiet nook of Jacobean England, where all seems in keeping with its motto, Deus nobis haec otia fecit. On the left of the gardened quadrangle are the apartments of the twelve brethren, on the right those of eight sisters, all bound not to practise forgery, heresy, sorcery, witchcraft and other crimes. Farther on are reached the Master’s house, and the entrance to the Hall and Chapel. The panelled Hall preserves its old fittings, and some portraits of sound Protestant divines, while in the coloured glass will be noticed the inscription of a quite mediÆval pun, Clamamus Abba Pater. The most striking feature of the Chapel is the two painted windows telling the story of Jacob, in pictures with Latin legends, the first representing Esau’s hunting errand, that must afterwards have been a sore subject with that pious founder.

High Street, now mounted to its highest, goes on as Spital Street to fork eventually as the Epsom and the London Roads, both of them, indeed, leading to London. Beyond this, all is smart and modern, where an airy suburb straggles on to the Downs. But on the right of Spital Street was passed the Grammar School, founded at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and still preserving some of its old features that make it worth a visit. Its treasure is a library of chained books, several scores in number, surpassed only by those at Wimborne Minster and at Hereford Cathedral. Schoolboys of our generation may be more interested in an antiquarian discovery of Dr. W. G. Grace, who found a musty record of the Guildford boys playing cricket so far back as the time of Queen Bess.

To the last has been left that which is not the least of Guildford’s lions, its old Castle, standing above St. Mary’s, a little to the right of the Market as we came up High Street. Guildford Castle is believed to date from Henry II., but first comes to mention in King John’s time. What has been left of it by the power Edax rerum is mainly its grim keep, solidly planted on a mound that may have been the site of a pre-Norman fortress. Beside this, part of the area is prettily laid out as a public garden. Some curious bits of carving are to be noted in the keep. Within the gateway on the lower side will be found the Surrey ArchÆological Society’s Museum, not a very large one as yet, but containing a varied show of county antiquities. From the top of the keep there is a fine view of the Wey valley.

This view may be enlarged by mounting the lane behind, that leads to a much less imposing modern fort on the Downs, by which goes out the grand walk along them to Newland’s Corner, and on by the line of the Pilgrims’ Way. On the opposite block of the Downs, above Guildford, the cemetery affords another good prospect point, reached by taking the steep rise of the old Hog’s Back road leading up from the bridge below the station. Near the entrance of this finely displayed burial-ground, a marble cross marks the grave of the author of Alice in Wonderland, with whom Guildford was a favourite sojourn. “There must have been something remarkable about that gentleman,” an official of the place opined to me, “for a good many has asked me where he lies.” One spectacle is no longer available on this stiff ascent, at the top of which, as Defoe states admiringly, the gallows used to stand so plain in view “that the Towns People from the High Street may sit at their Shop Doors and see the Criminals executed.”

Fair scenes about Guildford will be spoken of under another head. Let us here hold on down the Wey, which henceforth takes two forms, now coinciding, then going apart, the canalised Wey Navigation, and the wilful loops that could not be made to fit the course of this water-way, for which they have suffered depletion, but in flood time can yet assert themselves by turning the low meadows into lakes. As in the case of Hogarth’s “Industrious Apprentice,” the canal has thriven so that it may be called the main stream, while it is seldom so straight-lined or business-minded but that its tow-path makes a pleasant riverside walk. This canalisation was carried out as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, just after the Civil War, locks being then first introduced into England; and the opening of such a convenience for carrying corn and timber to London helped to bring back Guildford’s old prosperity.

Over flat meadows, the river goes out to the north, bending round the suburb of Stoke Park, then takes its course by a series of locks, bridges, and mills that make goals for boating parties. The first name of fame it reaches, some three straight miles from the town, is Sutton Place, standing back in its park that stretches down to the left bank. Loseley, above Guildford, is Sutton’s only rival as at once the stateliest and loveliest mansion in Surrey, taking a high place among the lordly halls of England. In the Reformation days, when donjon keeps could give place to orieled and gabled mansions, this was built by Sir Richard Weston, ancestor and namesake of the Wey’s canaliser. A peculiar feature is the use made of terra-cotta, on which, as on the windows of the Hall, is repeated the builder’s rebus, a bunch of grapes and a tun. It need hardly be said that such a house is rich in relics of the past. But indeed one cannot here speak worthily of what has had a whole sumptuous quarto devoted to it by Mr. Frederic Harrison,

who may well call it a landmark of English architecture, one of the earliest great houses not built with a design of defence.

The Wey’s next turn is round the village of Send, where its navigable branch makes eastward, while vagrant channels stray off a little north to touch Woking. This name may seem familiar to London travellers, yet few of them will know where and what Woking is. The lively new town that has grown up so fast on the heaths about Woking Junction, stands nearly two miles north of the original village, huddled about the tower and tiled roof of its old church, a landmark conspicuous over the river flat. Even when Defoe made his tour, this place lay “so out of all Road, that ’tis very little heard of in England; it claims however some Honour from its being once the Residence of ... the old Countess of Richmond, Mother to King Henry VII., who made her last Retreat here,” and who, he might have added, had the singular fortune of being thrice a bride in her teens. The moated royal manor has long disappeared; but this back-water village preserves a Market Hall as token of former dignity.

When the branches of the Wey unite about a mile east of Old Woking, it is only to split up again in vagrant loops, tangled by the taking in of a tributary from the commons near Aldershot. The knot of tortuous channels here encloses one of Surrey’s rare ruins, the remains of Newark Priory, of which the south transept walls still stand in broken state, impressive rather than imposing, to be a favourite rendezvous of picnic parties. Near the ruins a large old timber mill makes another landmark of these watery meadows, overlooked from the north by a bank bearing up the little church of Pyrford, with its faded wall paintings and like hints of antiquity.

Lying some two or three miles by sandy roads from Woking or from Byfleet stations, Newark is perhaps oftener visited by way of Ripley, a mile to the south, a pleasant village about a spacious green, where the “Talbot” and the “Anchor” have taken a new lease through the favour of cyclists. With this fraternity the Ripley road came to be a so frequent spin, that the Vicar, willing to run with the times, opened a free stable for cycles at his parsonage, and set apart special seats for their riders, who have repaid such hospitality by contributing a memorial window. Another hostelry, frequented by golfers, is the “Hautboy” of Ockham, birthplace of the scholastic theologian of that ilk. This oakland village is separated from Ripley by Ockham Park, a demesne of Earl Lovelace, Byron’s grandson, who has another seat not far off at East Horsley, where its Clock Tower may be seen standing up in the woods along the south side of the Downs, that since we left Guildford have been drawing away from the course of the river.

Following the Wey from Newark Priory, again we find its industrious and its idle channels at cross purposes with each other, the latter making one particularly extravagant bend eastward, so as to infect with its own devious character the roads that must tack towards bridges. At the Anchor Lock, and its quaint old inn, one might turn off to the right, across a feeble branch, for the little church of Wisley, and by it push on to Wisley Common, with its fir-girdled lakelet on the Ripley road, and its “Hut” hostelry, a combination of a snug hotel and of a “Trust” model public-house. Beside this road, on the west edge of the common, a board shows the way among pine woods to a new feature of the Wey valley, the Horticultural Society’s Gardens, transplanted from Turnham Green, already a sight worth seeing, but not open without an order from a Fellow. The nearest stations are Effingham and Horsley, each about three miles off to the south-east; and over the common the high-road leads on in a couple of miles to Street Cobham, near which the Mole comes within a mile or so of the Wey.

Striking off from the Wey Navigation on the other side, for instance by a footpath from a bridge half a mile beyond the Anchor Lock, one could soon reach Byfleet station on the main line, beyond which are the golf links of New Zealand and the woods of Anningsley. Now the straggling river waters the scattered hamlets of Byfleet, in which parish Henry VIII. is said to have been nursed at Byfleet Park. The main village, half an hour’s walk from the station, lies below the wooded ridge of St. George’s Hill, that now stands up to the right as a last stronghold of the heaths and pines of Surrey on the edge of the Thames valley.

Here the Wey Navigation seems to swerve needlessly to the left, meeting the branch with which it makes a junction beside the railway line. This branch is the Basingstoke Canal, of late years fallen into disuse, and in parts almost dried up, or choked with weeds; but there have been rumours of its being restored to activity. The tow-path of the united canal gives hence a plain walk to Weybridge, safe from the “Gadarene grunt” of the motor-car. The old channel takes an extremely crooked course nearer the flank of St. George’s Hill, which at its southern end one might mount to pass through the private grounds as the pleasantest path to Weybridge station, a mile beyond which the Wey makes its last twist into the Thames. Thus ends a river that has led us through the heart of Surrey, itself a goodly stream, and often decked out in such rich green attire as would beautify the most frumpish canal.