On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry--
The silence and the sun remain.

But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Comes Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.

In mocassins and deer-skin cloak
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far--oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him.

Merrow to the east edges on Clandon Park, the seat of one of the great
Surrey families, the Onslows. It is a notable space, perhaps a mile
square of grass dotted with superb groups of elms. "Capability" Brown
laid out the park, and he certainly saw what the capabilities of that
sunny sward could be. The house, which stands on the south-east corner,
is an imposing cube of red brick, patched here and there with ivy, and
as square and formal as the ornamental water and the park below it is
formal and serpentine. Leoni built it, and Rysbrach designed two of its
chimney-pieces.

In the park you may chance to meet the mole-catcher of the place--an
upholder of right traditions of an old English village. I met him
searching disconsolately for a couple of his traps, which he had set too
near the pathway and which had been carried off by thieving passers-by,
on whom may malisons light. "I've got forty traps about here," he told
me with some pride, adding with resignation to a persistent fate that
"they" would not let him set a trap near the path. "They" always took it
if he did.

West Clandon church stands in the corner of the park, and is chiefly
remarkable for a very curious old sundial, belonging perhaps to the days
of Henry II, and built upside down by "restorers" into a buttress of the
south wall. Time has dealt hardly with the church, and time, perhaps,
may still restore its own dial. Under the dial, when I was last in the
carefully tended little churchyard, the level turf was studded with
snowdrops.

In a field close by the village once took place a remarkable battle. A
correspondent of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ of 1796 gives the following
account of it, which he had verbatim from an old inhabitant. "A serpent
once infested a back lane in the parish of West Clandon for a long time.
The inhabitants were much disturbed and afraid to pass that way. A
soldier who had been condemned for