ge have each their own characteristic, from the Hog's Back to the
heights above Titsey. For me the view from the hill above Reigate has a
double memory; the purple and blue of the downs seen through the stems
of the beeches that line the crest, and the shadows thrown by a high
summer sun in the parks and fields below. The oaks and elms set
themselves in the open grass with little circles of darker green about
their feet, like the wooden stands of the trees of a Dutch toy farm.

Redhill joins Reigate to the east, new, red, spreading, a junction of
railways, a better sort of Woking. You do not have to wait from nine
minutes to three-quarters of an hour every time you come to Redhill. To
the schoolboy it has the merit of being a stage on the road from London
and the sea.

CHAPTER XXXIV

CROYDON

Croydon Palace.--A Neglected Relic.--Queen Elizabeth's
Waiters.--John Whitgift.--Hospital, chapel, and school.--A Record of
Cricket.--Macaulay's tyrant.--Izaak Walton differs.--Queen
Elizabeth's Little Black Husband.--Croydon colliers.--John
Ruskin.--By the Parish Pump.--John Gilpin.

Croydon is best reached by rail. It cannot be called a convenient
centre, for one returns to centres, and Croydon has little that would
recall a traveller. But it is an easy point of departure either for the
country east, by Addington and the Kentish border, or south through
Sanderstead to Coulsdon and Chaldon, or west by Beddington and the
Carshalton trout ponds to Epsom. You may walk in any direction, except
perhaps north, where you will walk into North Croydon. But in Croydon
itself there are still two or three things worth seeing.

One is the Archbishop's Palace. An Archbishop's Palace is the very last
building which would naturally associate itself with the Croydon tram
lines and Croydon up-to-dateness, and it is the last building with which
Croydon appears to wish to associate itself. The Palace stands apart
from the bustle of the place, unhonoured, unhappy and ignored. Since the
last Archbishop left it in the reign of George II it has served its turn
as business premises for a bleacher and a calico-printer; it has been a
wash-house, and is now a girls' school. One thing it has never been--of
sufficient interest to Croydon to be rescued from sacrilege and neglect,
and to take the place which is its due among historic national
possessions. Perhaps one should be thankful that the palace of Cranmer,
Whitgift and L