Surrey

dhead. This is, of course, a matter of taste, to some extent of upbringing. I was mainly reared in a country where stern and wild aspects of nature are cheaper than the lush charms of

the soil not suited for growing the "Cobbett corn" or the acacias which, with different degrees of success, he was trying to naturalise in his native country, when he carried on the trade of a nursery-gardener along with that of an uprooting journalist. For once, he has a laugh against himsel

the Devil's Punch Bowl, round which stretches of bracken, gorse and heath, broken dells, ponds and pine-crested ridges, fall into the valleys by slopes and hollows rich in green lanes, in tangled coppices, in old c

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by literary and scientific people, that the nickname Mindhead was suggested. More than one leading London consultant made his holiday retreat hereabouts, not keeping to himself the secret of the dry clear air in which delicate invalids can sit out of doors under winter sunshine. The merits of Hindhead as a health resort were advertised by Professor Tyndall building a house near

efore long may be spoken of as streets. The "Huts," improved into an hotel, has half a dozen rivals, from the mansion-like "Beacon" to the "Fox and Pelican" model public-house; and Glen Lea, oldest of Hindhead pensions, sees fresh competitors springing up every year. Houses are dear and lodgings hard to find in the fine season. As in the case of Davos and ot

, one of the best of her later novels, evidently deals with the neighbourhood, making a curious medley of real and fictitious names, and hardly doing justice to the scenery. An account of Hindhead a century ago is presented in an older novel called the King's Mail. Then Mr. Baring-Gould's Broom Squire opens with th

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moorland, looking over to Haslemere from the edge of the Punch Bowl. The gibbet was soon blown down; then on its site a granite cross with a nobler inscription was e

e of the Punch Bowl, Nicholas Nickleby's road has been brought down to a lower level, and the memorial stone with it; one must scramble up the sandy lane representing the old road to get the view from the cross. No description can do justice to this pano

to Farnham also runs a service of motor-cars that would give a good trip over this district, but without touching that highest and wildest point. Half-way up the ascent, near Shottermill Church and its fish-p

is easy to miss the way, unless by steering for clumps of wood high above the right of the railway some three miles on. Witley is also the station for Chiddingfold, a couple of miles south-e

nancier of our own time, under a costly tomb, with the inscription, "He loved the poor," which seems suggested by the career of Robin Hood. On his home at Lea Park, above Witley, this notorious adventurer lavished so much of other people's money, that there was some difficulty in disposing of a place which failed to be started as an hotel, even although baited with a golf course and other attractions of sport. In a better organised state of society, it should be purchased by the nation as free lodging

gn, fell away from such dignity, but in our time revived as centre of so choice a district, and has a busy station on the L. & S.W. Portsmouth line. The station lies beyond the roomy village or townlet, to which Hindhead pilgrims might well turn back for a glimpse of its broad street, forming a right angle at the modest Market Hall, junction point of byroads with the highway between Godalming and Midhurst. Its good old houses have been much overlaid by chalets and bungalows, for even in the valley here we are some hundreds of feet above the sea, and Haslemere has its own clientèle of heal

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atural history of the neighbourhood. The Recreation Ground on the same height offers a fine view across the valley to Hindhead, and northwards over the Fold country. Here we are on the steeper slope of Blackdown, which is rather higher than Hindhead, and still more wild, not as yet so much invaded by th

ill on the left, then turning up a deep hollow to reach the top at the "Huts." At the new church on Crichmere Green, a little way beyond the railway arch, the foot traveller should take a deep lane that looks as if it had strayed out of Devonshire, and this will bring him on the heath, over which a track bears left for the Huts, or he must keep up rather to the right for the Gibbe

l around are found tarns and pools, still perhaps known as Hammer Ponds, beside huge furrows driven through the earth by old searchers for iron. The marshy ground below Thursley drains into several ponds like Pudmore, that figures in Mr. Baring-Gould's story, as does the rock "Thor's Stone," haunted by a mythology older than legends of that devil who took such athletic jumps. High up on the heath, to the south of Grayshott, and about a mile to the right of the Portsmouth road, are the Waggoners' Wells, a chain of lakelets among dark woods, pronounced by George Eliot an ideal scene for a murder, admired also by Tennyson, who is said to have written here his "Flower in the Crannied Wall." On a lower level, to the north-west, beyond the Devil's Jumps, close to the Wey and the Surrey borde

yes or no eyes," its visitors cannot but be sensible of that "ampler ether," those restoring breezes that blow over Hindhead, untainted by smoky towns or misty flats. Too soon passes its season of purple glory; but it has other charms that win on one by fam

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in the south of England at least, this name has implied rather such marshy and rushy flats as, about Thursley, are still vernacularly called the "moor" par e

e, and thence falling to Liphook on the edge of Woolmer Forest, which straggles on by the new Longmoor Camp to White's Selborne. In the valley to the left, that is the course of the railway, runs the Sussex border, across which may be sought out scenes still more beautiful as more varied. Then on the north side lie another series of broken moorlands, by

And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling, pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense the stretches of purple heather, growing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farmhouses, so mellow in colour, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the earth and all it bears,

it was much occupied by Canadians, restlessly impatient allies, not altogether as welcome in the vicinity as in Flanders. Too many of them had nothing to do with their high pay but to waste it on liquor

are no novelty on Surrey commons,