ws the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled."

Box Hill must be pretty nearly the best-known hill in the world. It has
all the advantages. It is within easy reach of London for school treats,
excursions, choir outings, week-ends, and all other journeys in open
air; it has a railway station at its foot, and several inns, and a
tea-garden at the top, and a hundred Bank holidays have left it
unspoiled. The box-trees that name the hill are the finest in England.
Box-trees love chalk, and here they drive their roots into the crown and
scar of a cliff of chalk, so steep on one side down to the Mole that a
stone could almost be thrown from the path round the ridge into the
water. On the grass outside the box-grove the distance to the level
valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks as if you could
drive a golf ball straight from the hill on to the green; you may
speculate as to the beauty of the arc curved in the sunlight, and the
deadness with which the ball would lie after an absolutely perpendicular
drop--to the extreme danger of those disinterested in the experiment.
But the hill is not really steep enough. The contours crowd on the map,
but they show that you would have to drive nearly a quarter of a mile.

At a distance, in spring and summer, the trees which mark Box Hill are
not box or juniper, but the whitebeams that patch the deeper green of
the oaks and beeches with glaucous grey. The box-trees, though their
thick, snaky stems look as if they might be any age, are not all of them
old. The trees have more than once been cut and sold. Sir Henry Mildmay
put them up for auction for L12,000 in 1795 and apparently sold them for
L10,000 two years later, with twelve years to cut the wood in. In later
days, the wisdom of a War Office cleared a wide space of trees and built
a fort there; the wisdom of another War Office abandoned the fort as
useless. There it remains, behind spiked railings, the idlest monument
of a whim.

[Illustration: _View of Box Hill, Misty Day._]

[Illustration: _Dorking._]

CHAPTER XXIX

DORKING

Mr. Stiggins at the Marquis of Granby--A Ruin.--The battle of
Dorking.--Real fighting.--The Table and Cellar.--Water-souchy, a
delicious dish.--Wild cherries.--Dorking snails.--Sandy kine.--Women
witho