h, which
holds a grave and what looks like the sign of an inn; you may just
distinguish the royal arms. The pillars of the old church have fallen,
but where they stood, little clipped box-trees mark the line--a prettier
memorial than a drawn plan to hang in the vestry, but need the old
church have fallen? These level heights, perhaps, provoke
church-building, but how few spires stand on the horizons. Ranmer spire
you may see from half over mid-Surrey, but Ranmer is high on a ridge.
Here you are on a plateau, and the heights see each other no more than
the low ground. Kingswood's is the best seen of the spires on the
plateau; a shining thing, white as the chalk of the ridge.

From Epsom to the north is quiet, empty countryside. Esher is five miles
to the north-west as the crow flies; something more by road, but the
best roads near Esher are the wild pathways of Esher common. Midway
between Epsom and Esher, but among pastures, not in the heather of the
common, is Chessington. Chessington Hall and Chessington Church are deep
in the fields. The Hall may not be to-day quite the simple little
building that Fanny Burney knew, when Samuel Crisp, "Daddy" Crisp, had
it, but the garden and the trees, and the avenue to the church where she
walked and talked over his music with Dr. Burney can be little changed.
It was at Chessington that Fanny Burney took a packet from the postman
and found herself famous. _Evelina_, which not even her father knew she
had written, had taken the town. All the talk of the great men was of
_Evelina_. Dr. Johnson was praising it; Sir Joshua Reynolds would not
let his meals interrupt him, and took it with him to table. Edmund Burke
had sat through the night to finish it. That was in 1778, and a hundred
and thirty years after that wonderful morning her delight is as
infectious as dance music. "Dr. Johnson's approbation!" she writes in
her diary, "--it almost crazed me with agreeable surprise--it gave me
such a flight of spirits that I danced a jig to Mr. Crisp, without any
preparation, music, or explanation--to his no small amazement and
diversion." She danced round the mulberry tree on the Chessington lawn,
so she told Sir Walter Scott years afterwards.

She was just twenty-six. The mulberry-tree still stands by the window,
and the fields by Chessington are still as green and quiet as when poor
Mr. Crisp, a writer whom a careless world did not want to read, retired
from his disappointments to a home whe