thin. The cave runs
back, some way from the road, into pleasantly dubious darkness. In this
case, according to the tradition of the place, lived the witch, Mother
Ludlam, whose caldron lies in the tower of Frensham Church. Another
excavation in the ground a few yards away has also its own tradition,
or rather two traditions. One is that it was the regular abode of a
hermit named Foote, who starved to death in it; another, that Foote was
a lunatic who was found dying in the hole, but actually died in the
workhouse. The details are precise. "Foote was a gentleman. He came one
day to the Unicorn Inn at Farnham. Next day he hired a man to wheel a
heavy portmanteau to Moor Park gate, when he told the man to put it
down. Foote was taken very ill, was found by old Hill the keeper and
taken to Swift's cottage where Hill lived. The union officials took
Foote and his heavy portmanteau to the Union. 'It's only buttons
inside,' said they. 'It's gold! gold!' exclaimed Foote with his dying
breath." So runs the local version.

[Illustration: _In Moor Park._]

At the gates of the entrance of Moor Park stands a charming cottage,
brick and timber embowered in roses. It has been known at different
times as "Dean Swift's Cottage" and "Stella's Cottage." Perhaps neither
lived there. Outside the park the Wey broadens out into a wide pool,
shaded by magnificent sycamores, and then drops through sluices to a
lower level, to twist back to the north-west under the walls of Waverley
Abbey.

Waverley Abbey is the greatest of the ruins in a county where ruins are
few. Once the Abbey precinct covered sixty acres of ground; to-day
nothing remains but tumbled walls and broken gates. It was not the
oldest nor the richest of Abbeys in the county, but in some ways it was
the noblest foundation of all. It was the earliest house of Cistercian
monks in England; it inherited the spirit and the traditions of one of
the finest of the monastic orders, the stricter sect of the monks of St.
Benedict; its brethren were simple, kindly men with few wants and little
money, who yet were generous hosts and the most skilful farmers of their
day; it was the elder sister of Tintern Abbey, the mother of the Abbeys
of Garendon, Ford, Combe and Thame, and the grandmother of seven others;
and its abbots had precedence in the chapters of abbots throughout the
order of Cistercians.

The White Monks, as the Cistercians were called, used to choose wild and
lonely places for