you tell us to consider, we are of the same opinion still." The very fact that they are beyond all doubt men of high and honourable character, may make it less easy for them to yield. They feel how conscientiously, and even with a wish to deal justly, and-as far as, in law, was possible to them-even generously, by India, they arrived at their original decision. Knowledge of this may make them only the more tenacious of it, when all the world cries out upon it as a blunder. Here seems to be a new example of an old experience, that sometimes the most ingenious and monstrous blunders are those of the ablest and most conscientious men.

AS THE CROW FLIES.

66

only had to toil up Rainmore Hill to Polesden, to be sure if they did not get their bill paid, to at least secure a box at Drury Lane for themselves and friends. If stories were true Sherry" was not very scrupulous in his expedients for raising ready supplies, relying on his ultimate power of always obtaining money. On one occasion he sold a butcher a drove of hogs that he had allowed a friendly farmer to drive into his stubbles, and on another time when a choleric and refractory butcher refused to leave a juicy leg of mutton that had been ordered, without being first paid for it, Sherry sent a servant, while the joint was in the parlour for approval, to thrust it in the pot, and begin to sodden it, so as to checkmate the irascible tradesman when he asked for its return.

Not far from Polesden, is Ranmore Common, the breezy summit of a hill that commands Dorking, a wild undulating sweep of fox-haunted furze and brake with a twentyfive miles' range of landscape.

asked a traveller of an old native breaking "Can you see St. Paul's from here?" stones on this high plateau of Surrey down.

DUE SOUTH.-DORKING AND WOTTON. ONE dart from the road the crow makes between Norbury Park and Dorking, to visit Westhumble,Camilla Lacy," the house built by Mr. Locke for his friend General D'Arblay. "Lor' bless your honour, yes," said the old To this pleasant retreat Little Fanny D'Arman, pushing back the wire shade from his eyes; blay" came when she gave the general her hand, "and generally just before a shower-it's aland here she wrote Camilla, one of her most successful novels, drawing some of her cha-ways going to be wet, master, when we see Saint Paul's, so we calls it hereabouts our racters from the family of Mr. Locke. Madame weather-glass." D'Arblay wrote Camilla, or a Picture of Youth-for which she received three thousand pounds-in 1795, two years after her marriage, and the year her tragedy of Edwy and Elgiva failed at Drury Lane. The world may forget Miss Burney the novelist, but they will never forget the keeper of that admirable Diary, for, amid much silly toadyism and sentimental vanity, she has left us an extraordinary series of pictures of internal court life. It is the only book in which we really see the respectable old royal couple and their wild and selfish children drawn

in detail.

Not far away over these hills is Polesden, among whose beech woods is the house where Sheridan retired during one of the lulls of his revelling life, just after his marriage with his second wife, Miss Ogle, a daughter of the Dean of Winchester. It was here in 1795, just after his famous reply on the Begum charge, and his four days' deluge of eloquence and invective, that this extraordinary meteor of a man expended twenty thousand pounds (Heaven and the Jews only knew where he got it). He was living here during the great debates on the mutiny at the Nore and the dreadful Irish Rebellion. A toothless old man is still living at Polesden, who, when young and curly-headed, was a foot-boy in Sheridan's house. He has preserved many traditions of those wild and reckless days. It was not unfrequent, says the old boy, for Sheridan to drive out with four horses, and before the first stage to have the leaders seized by an ambuscade of hook-nosed sheriff's officers. It was well known to the Dorking tradesmen that they

Thus time and distance dwarf objects. A king's reign forms a line in a chronicler's book of dynasties, and a huge cathedral becomes at a distance a countryman's weather-glass.

The Aladdin's Palace of a mansion that crowns

this embowered hill, and rises like a fortress above Dorking, is Denbies, now Mr. Cubitt's, site of an obscure farm-house by Mr. Jonathan once Mr. Denison's, and originally built on the Tyers, that ingenious and eccentric gentleman who in 1730 bought Vauxhall, in the Borough, and opened a nightly Ridotto al fresco. An hypochondriac, like his son Tommy Tyers, who was an amateur poet, and a friend of Dr. Johnson's, the proprietor of the centre of fashion and folly turned the place into a sort of sentimental cemetery. One wood of eight acres he called "the Penseroso," and it was supposed to resemble the pleasantest side of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There was a small temple with elegiac inscriptions, and a loud but concealed clock to break the intolerable "sound of nothing." A dismal alcove with paintings by roystering Hayman, of The Dying Christian and The Dying Unbeliever, and the stern statue of Truth trampling on a mask, had as a of a walk, two "elegantly carved pedestals" wind-up and final corrector, at the termination with two skulls. Beneath one, a lady's, was

written :

Blush not, ye fair, to own me-but be wise,
Nor turn from sad mortality your eyes,

and so on, ending thus:

When coxcombs flatter, and when fools adore,
Here learn the lesson to be vain no more.

Why start? The case is yours-or will be soon,
Some years perhaps-perhaps another moon.
Life, &c. &c.

*

Farewell! remember! nor my words despise,.
The only happy are the only wise.

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Beneath the gentleman's cranium was this the Regent has, perhaps, joined in the chorus poetical rap on the knuckles: of "Billy's too Young to drive Us," or Billy Pitt and the Farmer." The captain not only won the gold cup from the Anacreontic Society for his song "Ad Poculum," but carried his poems through twenty-four editions, and was for years the choicest spirit of the Beef Steak Club, where he was always the chosen brewer of the punch. What a contrast, this quiet haven with noisy Offley's and the club revelries that never shook the Captain's iron constitution! He has been described as one night heartlessly reading a funeral service from the back window of Offley's that opened on Covent Garden churchyard, and pouring out as a swilling libation a crown bowl of punch on the grave of the original of Mr. Thackeray's Costigan, a poor, clever, worn-out sot, who had been recently buried there. If this was the fun of the Regency times, Heaven guard us from its revival under whatever Prince.

All this sham asceticism of the proprietor of the Lambeth tea-gardens, was swept away by the next proprietor in 1767, and instead of dismal graves there are now broad sweeps of sunny lawn, and instead of ladies' and gentlemen's skulls, a scarlet blaze of geranium-beds and golden billows of calceolarias.

The crow drops from Ranmore Hill upon Dorking, which stands close to the old Roman road, or "stone street" leading from Arundel to the Sussex coast. There is one long street with an ugly church of the Georgian Gothic, lying back shily behind the houses, as if ashamed of itself. The whole town is guarded by wooded hills.

The literary pilgrim looks in vain for his special throne-the Marquis of Granby. The famed house, where the fatal widow beguiled old Weller, and where the Shepherd, after imbibing too deeply of his special vanity, was cooled in the horse-trough, is gone. Let the pilgrim be informed that the real "Markis" was the King's Head (now the Post Office), a great coaching house on the Brighton road in the old days, and where many a smoking team drew up when Sammywell was young. Long before old Weller mounted his chariot throne Dorking was a quiet place, much frequented by London merchants (chiefly the Dutch) who came down to see Box Hill, and to eat fresh-caught perch. Here and there a gable end marks a house of this period, but the only history the town claims is that its church has the honour of containing the body of that fat Duke of Norfolk, who died in 1815, and who was famous for eating more beef steaks at a meal than any other Englishman living. This portly peer was the sworn boon companion of Fox and the Regent, and the daring man who, in 1798, consistently opposed war with revolutionary France, and was dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy of Yorkshire for having, at the Whig Club, toasted "the Majesty of the People.' At Deepdene, that beautifully wooded estate, with hilly plantations rising above it in three dark green billows, "Anastatius" Hope resided, and collected his stores of Etruscan vases, ancient statues, and Thorwaldsen sculptures. At Deepdene Mr. Disraeli wrote Coningsby.

Through Deepdene Park, with its huge twisted Spanish chesnuts, and its defaced castle ruin, approached by a funereal triple avenue of limes, the crow skims to an unobtrusive cottage near Brockham Green, that many a midnight has echoed to the songs of that Bacchanalian veteran of the Regent's times, Captain Morris, to whom the fat Duke of Norfolk, after much pressure, gave this asylum for his old age Under this quiet roof

The crow cannot tear himself away en route for Southampton without one swoop on Wotton, close to Dorking, where John Evelyn was born. His life was uneventful; first, a traveller and student in Italy, then a secret correspondent of the Royalists, and after the Restoration one of the first and most active fellows of the Royal Society. After much public employment, and much patronage of all good and useful discoveries, Evelyn inherited Wotton, and was here in the great storm of 1703, when above a thousand trees were blown down in sight of the house. Evelyn was a great promoter of tree planting, and he particularly mentions, in his quiet, amiable way, so devoid of all selfassertion, that his grandfather had at Wotton timber standing worth one hundred thousand pounds. Of that timber in Evelyn's own lifetime thirty thousand pounds' worth had fallen by the axe or storm.

66

They show at Wotton an old beech table, six feet in diameter, which is probably as old as the days of "Silvy Evelyn;" but the oak table he himself mentions, five feet broad, nine feet long, and six inches thick, is gone. The worthy man, whose life was, as Horace Walpole says, a course of inquiry, study, curiosity, instruction, and benevolence," has described his own house at Wotton, where he wished to found his ideal college, as "large and ancient, suitable to those hospitable times, and so sweetly environed with delicious streams and venerable woods as, in the judgment of strangers as well as Englishmen, it may be compared to one of the most pleasant seats in the nation, most tempting to a great person and a wanton purse, to render it conspicuous; it has rising grounds, meadows, woods, and water in abundance."

Skirting the woods Evelyn loved so well, the crow passes to Leith Hill. From the tower, under whose pavement the builder, Mr. Hull, an eccentric old barrister, who had known Pope and Bishop Berkeley, and who had lived for years close by, in learned retirement, was buried in 1772, the bird sees a region of moor and sandbank, the delight of Mr. Linnell and a

host of landscape painters. The eye has a radius of enjoyment here two hundred miles in circumference. Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Berkshire, Bucks, Herts, Middlesex, Kent, Essex, and Wiltshire are visible in miniature. That little misty spot of firs is Nettlebed, in Oxfordshire; that glimmer through a blue dimple of the horizon is the sea glittering through Shoreham Gap, a cleft in the South Downs, thirty miles distant.

The time to catch the glimpse of the sea is

about eleven A.M. of a clear but not too hot a morning, when no mist rises from the intervening valleys. Then the sea sparkles for a moment or two as the sun passes Shoreham gap, and, with a glass, you can even catch a white glimpse of a passing sail.

One of the greatest finds ever made of AngloSaxon coins was in 1817, at Winterfield Farm, near Dorking. Seven hundred coins in a wooden box were turned up by the plough in a field near an old Roman road, not far from Hanstiebury camp, which is generally thought to have been Danish. The coins, caked together by coppery alloys, which had decomposed since the owner had buried them here with fear and doubt, were lying twelve inches below the surface, in a patch of dark earth, always observed to be specially fertile. There was money of many kings, but chiefly of Ethelwolf (265) and Ethelbert (249). It is supposed they were not buried here before 870, the year Athelstan began to reign. Mr. Barclay, of Bury Hill, a descendant of the Apologist for the Quakers, and of that Mr. David Barclay, the wealthy London merchant, who feasted three successive Georges at his house in Cheapside, bought most of this great find, and generously gave

it to the British Museum.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JOHN
ACKLAND.

A TRUE STORY.

IN THIRTEEN CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I.

In the following extraordinary narrative nothing is fictitious but the names of the

persons.

ABOUT thirty-five or forty years ago, before the border territory of Texas had become a state of the great American Union, a Virginian gentleman, living near Richmond, received from a gentleman of Massachusetts, living near Boston, a letter pressing for punctual payment of a debt owing to the writer of it by the person to whom it was addressed. The debt was a heavy one. It was a loan for a limited period, contracted partly on mortgage and partly on other less valid securities. The period for which it was originally contracted had been frequently renewed at increasing rates of interest. The whole capital would shortly be due; and renewal

of the loan (which seems to have been
asked for) was firmly declined, on the
ground that the writer of the letter was
now winding up his business at Boston
preparatory to the undertaking of an en-
tirely new business at Charleston; whither
it was his intention to proceed very
shortly. Such was the general purport
of this letter. The tone of it was cour-
teous, but peremptory. The name of the
gentleman who received it we shall sup-
pose to have been Cartwright, and that of
the gentleman who wrote it to have been
Ackland. Mr. Cartwright was the owner
of an estate, not a very large one (which,
with the reader's permission, we will call
Glenoak), on the banks of the James
River. The Cartwrights were an old Vir-
ginian family, much esteemed for their an-
tiquity. Three generations of male Cart-
wright babies had been christened Stuart
(because, sir, the Cartwrights had always
fought for the Stuarts, sir, in the old
country), and in Virginia a very mode-
rate amount of family antiquity has always
commanded for the representative of it as
much consideration as is accorded in Eng-
land to the lineage of a Beaufort or a
Howard. The personal reputation of this
present Philip Stuart Cartwright, however,
was not altogether satisfactory. It was
regretted that a man of his parts and pro-
perty should have contributed nothing to
the strength and dignity of the territorial
aristocracy of old Virginia in the legis-
lature of his state-a legislature of which
the Virginians were justly proud. The
estate of Glenoak, if well managed, would
have doubtless yielded more than the
income which was spent, not very reputably,
by the owner of it, whenever he had a
run of luck at faro. But the estate was
not well managed, and, between occasional
but extravagant hospitalities on this estate,
and equally extravagant indulgence in the
stimulant of high stakes and strong liquors
at the hells and bars about Richmond, Mr.
Philip Cartwright passed his time unprofit
ably enough; for pulling the devil by the
tail is a fatiguing exercise, even to a strong
man. Mr. Cartwright was a strong man,
however, and a handsome man, and a tall.

66

Quite a fine man, sir," said his friends. "You may have seen Philip S. Cartwright as drunk as a hag, sir, but you will have always found him quite the cavalier." And, in truth, he had grand manners, and pleasant manners, too, this hard-living, devilmay-care gentleman, which embellished the impression of his vices. And he was a