not a man: and
yet it is a thing to ask about. Ah! it is in vain, THING, that you thus
are _making your preparations_; in vain that you are setting your
trammels! The DEBT, the blessed debt, that best ally of the people, will
break them all; will snap them, as the hornet does the cobweb; and even
these very 'Semaphores' contribute towards the force of that ever
blessed debt."

Semaphore House still stands upon Pewley Hill, a modern villa; opposite
it, which would infuriate the old reformer if he could see it, War
Office Ground, marked off with barbed wire and minatory notice-boards. A
hundred years hence, perhaps the fort on Pewley Hill will be exhibited
as one of the curiosities of nineteenth-century Guildford.

Pewley Hill is dull enough in itself to-day, when the down grass has
gone and the bricks are multiplying, but it leads to some of the wildest
and oldest and sweetest of all scenes in the county. You must go over
Pewley Hill to come to the downs, and the downs between Guildford and
Netley, by Newlands Corner, above Albury and Chilworth, are for me, at
all events, the loveliest spot in Surrey. There are other heights in
Surrey with wider views of scenery; there is Hindhead with its almost
complete circle of horizon, from Nettlebed by Henley to the Devil's Dyke
above Brighton; there is the road above Reigate, which looks out over a
thousand roofs and miles of well farmed fields; and there is Leith Hill,
the highest of all hills in south eastern England. But the stretch of
downland running from Guildford to Newlands Corner has a charm that
belongs to none of these. It is not merely the peace and sunshine of the
broad path along the ridge, with its downland flowers and Chalk Hill
Blue butterflies; not only the width and extent of the view over the
Weald, though it is of all views in Surrey one of the loveliest--unlike
the flatter panoramas of Leith Hill and Reigate in that it is a view not
only of fields and meadows, but of tree-clad hills, shouldering into
fainter greens and greys away to Hampshire and Sussex. The enchantment
is something else; the closeness of touch with so much that is dim and
old; the nearness of so much that cannot be reached in changing towns,
on modern roads. For this is unchanged, untouched, unsoiled, part of the
great Way that brought the merchants of Cornwall riding to the Roman
port of Rutupiae in the Isle of Thanet with tin mined in the
Cassiterides. The valley below may have changed f