e close to the churchyard. There are rides cut
through the wood in which broods of young pheasants are fed by their
fostermothers' coops; and looking down one of these rides on a day early
in August, I watched for some time a curious collection of birds
feeding together in front of the coops. There were the young pheasants,
of course, there was quite a crowd of small birds, finches chiefly, but
a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight
turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and
pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but
there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me
sailed five herring gulls, high and slow.

[Illustration: _St. Martha's Chapel._]

St. Catherine's chapel, on the other side of Guildford, has not the same
lonely charm as St. Martha's. It has never, like St. Martha's, been
restored, and the hill on which it stands is sacred to nobody. Children
climb about its walls and windows; cockneys scratch their names, and
picnic parties bestrew the grass with paper. Yet St. Catherine's, in the
days before pilgrimages ceased and shrines were left to moulder, perhaps
heard as many Aves as her sister chapel on the hill beyond the Way. A
country legend is common to both chapels. St. Catherine and St. Martha,
in the wonderful days of the giants, were sisters who built chapels on
neighbouring hills. They had but one hammer between them, and they
hurled it high over the valley one to another, St. Martha catching it
from St. Catherine, driving in a nail and hurling it back again.

North of Guildford to the west is Worplesdon Common, a stretch of
heathery, rushy ground over which have gone many marches and
manoeuvres, and north of the common is the home of Mr. Frederick
Selous, the African traveller and naturalist. Mr. Selous throws his
collection of trophies open to the public for a small sum, and his
garden is known to the readers of the _Field_ as the home of rare and
shy birds. The owner has described, with callous disregard of the
feelings of less fortunate ornithologists, the nesting operations among
his bird boxes of half a dozen nuthatches.

To the north-east, a mile from the main road from Guildford to Ripley,
is Sutton Place, perhaps the finest piece of domestic architecture in
the south of England. Mr. Frederic Harrison has described it at length
in his _Annals of an Old Manor House_. It was built by Sir Richard
West