its own author.
George Eliot wrote much of _Middlemarch_ in a cottage near the church.
Fishermen know Shottermill, for its hillsides are ladders of small
ponds, in which tens of thousands of trout have been bred for other,
wilder streams. The Surrey Trout Farm began its existence in one of
these chains of ponds; its farmers breed their Loch Levens and rainbows
now, I think, in another chain. What is the _metier_ of a trout farm?
Who shall decide? There are fishermen who would never knowingly throw a
fly over a trout that had been hand-fed with chopped horseflesh; and
there are other fishermen who, if there were no trout farms, would never
have anything to fish for. The ponds have their own fascination; not,
perhaps, at meal-times, when the water is lashed to froth by the
darting, gleaming bodies--that is too greedy a business. But when a
passer-by on a spring morning sees a pound fish fall back into the water
with a meditative flop, he may pay the pond the compliment of wishing
himself elsewhere. One accompaniment of a trout farm he may hope to
escape--the sight of a dead kingfisher. Without wire netting,
kingfishers find out the young fry only too quickly, and a dead
kingfisher spoils all pleasure for a fisherman.

And so, from Haslemere by a rough path up the hill, or through
Shottermill by a straight main road, or a shady lane grown over with
almost every tree of hedgerows and woods, we come to Hindhead. There are
many ways to the top, and these, though in some ways the most
convenient, are not the best. But the best, which is to reach it by the
old Portsmouth road from Thursley, can be kept for later in the day. The
worst way to see Hindhead is to follow the motor-cars up the main road.
The motor-cars see the road, but never Hindhead at all.

[Illustration: _Brookbank Cottage, Shottermill, where George Eliot lived
for a time._]

Hindhead is the most superb and the most disappointing thing in Surrey.
A quarter of a century ago it was wild moorland; then Professor Tyndall
proclaimed that since he could not go to the Bel Alp, he would go to the
next best place, and from that day the hill has changed to streets,
villas, and hotels. London arrives every Saturday: London swarms on
Sunday. But you can still see, or can guess, something of the grandeur
and loneliness of the place; best, perhaps, on the east and the northern
slopes towards Thursley; most fully, alone on the highest point, Gibbet
Hill.

Hindhead, before