in; snipe cut high arcs in the blue and
drum down from the sailing clouds; perhaps from the very heart of the
thicket the nightingale bursts into a pulsing riot of song. Surrey
varies extraordinarily widely as a shelter and a nesting ground for
birds, but most of its birds, I think, know the Wey Canal.

Of the seven streams which surround Newark Abbey the northernmost runs
under the little hill on which stands Pyrford Church. Pyrford itself, on
its outskirts, unhappily, is beginning to hear Woking. The Woking
builder's hammer is already ringing under its trees. But the heart of
Pyrford hitherto remains untouched. A cluster of red-brick
farm-buildings, a footpath over meadows of buttercups, a score of
arching elms, and a little shingle-spired Norman church on a knoll above
the stream--Pyrford is one of the smallest and sweetest of Weyside
villages. Few churches have so strong an impression of an untouched
past. In plan it is scarcely altered from its Norman design of the
twelfth century; and it stands on its knoll overlooking the meadows away
to the great Priory of which it was a chapel, the Priory in ruins, and
itself with hardly a stone loosened for nearly eight centuries. The roof
is later than the walls, but there is a fascination in staring up at the
old oak timber. It was the same vista of retreating beams of mighty wood
on which the eye of the Newark priest droning from the altar must have
rested; perhaps for his sleepy congregation there was the same glimpse
of ivy tendrils creeping in under the eaves, and on drowsy afternoons in
May the same chatter and hiss of nesting starlings. From the scanty
scraps of the paintings on the wall you can only guess vaguely at the
texts of the old Sunday sermons: manna falls in the wilderness; Moses
brings water out of the rock; probably the congregation listened with
most eagerness to the third, the death of Jezebel.

[Illustration: _Mill on the Wey, between Pyrford and Ripley._]

Donne, the poet, perhaps knew the paintings well. In the days when he
was still unforgiven by Sir George More of Loseley for having run away
with his daughter Anne, he and his bride lived for some years as the
guests of Sir John Wolley, Queen Elizabeth's secretary, at Pyrford Park.
May it not have been the seven-streamed Wey by Pyrford which gave him
his stanzas for _The Bait_, his parody of Marlowe?

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden san