s in country deep enough to forget the railway
altogether, and to take to the water as the highway. The Wey wanders in
and out by the village, and half-a-mile away at Send the Navigation
canal joins the Wey proper, as the little river has come to be called to
distinguish it from the canal. The canal cuts businesslike corners and
straight lines when the Wey, having plenty of time to spare, wants to
wander an extra two or three miles about a field. From Send to Weybridge
or to Guildford, down stream or up, by the canal towing-path or by boat,
is a delightful journey in spring or summer. As good a round as can be
taken walking is from Woking through Send by Newark Priory, Pyrford and
Wisley to Byfleet, where the railway can be joined or the journey
continued to Weybridge or back to Woking. But there are, of course,
twenty ways of seeing the little villages that cluster round the Wey so
closely in this corner of Surrey, either on foot or by boat, or rowing
and walking both.

But Woking has not always been quiet and old-fashioned and sleepy. Once
it was a royal manor, and contained a royal residence. William the
Conqueror held Woking in demesne himself, and it passed through the
hands of every king until James I, who gave it to one of his foresters,
Sir Edward Zouch. Sir Edward had to pay something for his privilege. He
held the manor on condition that he was to bring to the king's table, on
the Feast of St. James each year, the first dish at dinner, and with the
dish the satisfactorily large rent of a hundred pounds in coined gold of
the realm. Perhaps he still made something out of his tenants; at all
events, a further token of gratitude, he was to wind a call in Woking
Forest on Coronation Day. He may have liked the rental, but he could not
have liked the old palace, for he knocked down every brick of it. The
strangest and most melancholy fate seems to wait on every palace in
Surrey built or lived in by an English king,--even by the friend of a
king. Of Oatlands, Guildford, Woking, Nonsuch, Sheen, each a king's
palace, scarcely a stone remains; Wolsey's palace by the Mole is nothing
but a gateway; the Archbishops' palace at Croydon has sunk as low as a
wash-house. Kingston owns the stone on which English kings have been
crowned; but elsewhere in Surrey the royal hand has touched only to
destroy.

A persistent association hangs to the name of the town by the station,
undeserved but traditional. Woking, like the Duke of Pl