ayades, and with their nimble feet,
Soft dances lead, although their airie shape
All but a quicke Poeticke sight escape,
There _Faunus_ and _Sylvanus_ keepe their Courts,
And thither all the horrid hoast resorts,
When like the Elixar, with his evening beames,
The sunne has turn'd to gold the silver streames.

Here have I seene our _Charles_, when great affaires
Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares,
Chacing the royall Stagge, the gallant beast,
Rowz'd with the noyse 'twixt hope and feare distrest,
Resolv's 'tis better to avoyd, than meet
His danger, trusting to his winged feet."

Which he does, a most moving business, until at last the gallant animal
turns. He stands at bay--

"Till _Charles_ from his unerring hand lets flie
A mortall shaft, then glad, and proud to dye
By such a wound he fals, the Chrystall flood
Dying he dyes, and purples with his blood."

Between Egham and Thorpe to the south is one of the few fine Elizabethan
houses in the county, pleasantly named Great Fosters. But even Great
Fosters, with all the charm of its gables, its chimneys and its
mullioned windows, does not stand in quite such sharp contrast to the
garishness of the Holloway buildings as the little village of Thorpe
itself. Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard.
But neither Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which
have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all Surrey
villages, can surpass Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and
quiet brooding over the past. Enter Thorpe from the north by the fields,
and you will walk by lanes over which a hundred years have passed
without adding a tile or a tree to cottages or cottage gardens; and in
Thorpe itself you can sit near the church on the edge of a stone stile,
and look round at walls and roofs which might surely have sheltered Sir
John Denham himself, walking by Thorpe to Chertsey. The stile stands
across an ancient right of way, which crosses the fields; a straight
line from the churchyard to Chertsey. John de Rutherwyk, doubtless,
often walked or rode that lonely byway; perhaps it was he who raised the
level path dry and well-drained out of the swampy, snipe-haunted meadows
that lay between the little church and the great Abbey.

[Illustration: _Thorpe._]

South of Chertsey to the Wey is rather uninteresting country. Addlestone
lies between Chertse