all the fields
with the horses and the farm machinery. Runemede was being rolled.

South of that great meadow, Egham stands opposite Staines, separated by
the river and a mile of dull road. Egham may have once had attractions,
but they have nearly all disappeared. Nothing old or quiet could live
near the Holloway College. A building of such appalling pretensions
sears its neighbourhood like a hot iron. The town takes colour from its
flamboyant arrogance; the local builder studs his rough-cast with glass,
red and green and blue. Two old almshouses stand by the main street of
the town; one, a lowly set of cottage rooms, built by Sir John Denham in
1624, crouches quietly apart; the other, two hundred years younger, but
still good Georgian brick, stands behind a gateway in grounds which,
when I saw them last, were a miracle of untidiness. The almshouses, were
rebuilt in 1828, when perhaps the grass round them was mown also.

Epitaphs and monuments can be dull enough, but no one could call the
monuments dull which family piety has erected in Egham church to the
memory of Sir John Denham, father of the poet. Sir John, clothed in a
shroud, quits his tomb at the Last Trump; below him, among skeletons and
skulls, two grisly corpses writhe to the light. It is edifying to
conceive the satisfaction with which Sir John's descendants must have
feasted on such horrors every Sunday. A gentler memory lives on a stone
erected "to the most dutiful, engaging, and tender child of seven years
old. Miss Sarah Honywood"; and a finer epitaph is Garrick's, written to
the memory of Thomas Beighton, a former vicar:--

"He had no foe, and CAMDEN was his friend."

[Illustration: _Entering Egham._]

Sir John Denham, the poet and unsuccessful defender of Farnham Castle in
the Parliamentary Wars, lived at the house which is now the vicarage,
and from its windows looked out on the long rising slope of Cooper's
Hill. He has been laughed at for his description of the hill as an "airy
mountain," but three hundred years ago, before the hill was cut up with
hedges and ditches, and when he could look across open grass to its
foot, Cooper's Hill may well have seemed higher than to-day. It is
higher than St. Anne's Hill, after all, and can make an imposing break
on the horizon.

Here is Runemede as Sir John Denham saw it from Cooper's Hill:--

"There lies a spatious and a fertile Greene,
Where from the woods, the _Dryades_ oft meet
The N