a little hill inside the town and is surrounded by a park that climbs the slope. No more than the Norman keep is left, and it is too crowded by houses for a sufficient view, too small to be of much consequence and beauty. It may have been once a temporary residence of royalty, for there was hunting all about, but it never stood assault and its annals are of meager interest. Castles and women! Their romance lies in the endurance of a siege. But as all castles have their gossip of violent days there is a legend that once in Saxon times, Alfred son of Ethelred landed in Kent with a company of Normans. This was taken as an act of insurrection to recover his father's crown, and he was captured, tortured and put to death in Guildford together with five hundred of his attendants.

Henry the Second made a royal park at Guildford and built a palace, but this is entirely swept away, although grain is supposed to show still a different color on the lines of its foundation. King John kept Christmas once at Guildford. All of the Edwards came and several Henrys. Elizabeth traveled hereabouts by coach until the county protested at the sum that her horses cost the district.

And Guildford is the scene of a novel by Martin Tupper-"Stephan Langton"—and I bought it later in a shop and tried to read it. I had thought of Tupper only as the author of "Proverbial Philosophy," which used to be bound in ooze leather and left forever on parlor tables all round Boston as a proof of culture.

It was about forty years ago that the castle grounds came into the possession of the city corporation and a

premium was offered for the best suggestion how a park might be made of it. One of these plans offered a hint that "the ugly ruin in the center" should be demolished and in place of it there should be erected "an iron band stand painted green, picked out with gold." Happily the offer was rejected.

Guildford was a usual halt of Mr. Pepys on his journeys of business down to Portsmouth. He records that in the garden of his inn he cut "sparagus for supper-the best that ever I ate. " And again he remarks that in a bet he won a quart of sack "trying who could go best over the edge of an old fountain well" whatever that may mean. And Jane Austen who lived near by at Chawton sometimes shopped at Guildford. " Very lucky in my gloves" she writes -got them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near than because it looked like a shop, and gave only four shillings for them; after which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting that they cannot be good for anything."

66

Anyone who has motored through Guildford has observed a great clock that swings from the Town Hall above the street. In sixteen eighty-three when the Hall was built a certain John Aylward, a clock maker, came to Guildford to engage in business. But the guild refused permission, so he set up his shop outside the borough where he built this clock. He presented it to the Corporation, which so sweetened its disposition that he was given the freedom of the town.

We were on the road by ten o'clock and struck south a mile or so to Shalford. It was here, if tradition is cor

rect, that Bunyan located his Vanity Fair; for the Pilgrims' Way runs near the town and a great fair had been kept since the middle ages. It covered more than a hundred acres and its booths are supposed to have been placed in the meadows north of the town below St. Catherine's Chapel. It has been hinted that the Delectable Mountains were the rim of Sussex Downs, and that the Slough of Despond was the marshy land of Shalford Common. Anyway Bunyan lived for a time at Guildford and then in a cottage on the common. During this residence it seems likely that he wandered among the gaudy trading of the booths. "Then I saw in my Dream," he wrote, "that when they were got out of the Wilderness, they presently saw a Town before them, and the name of that Town is Vanity; and at the Town there is a Fair kept, called Vanity Fair: it is kept all the year long; it beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the Town where 'tis kept is lighter than Vanity; and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is Vanity. As is the saying of the wise, all that cometh is Vanity.

As we entered Shalford we passed the church and I saw the decayed remnant of the village stocks. And, as if the days of Bunyan were not wholly passed, I picked up from the pavement a leaflet of a revival urging all to come to God. But somewhat beyond the center of the town a tavern looked out across the common in shrewder invitation toward a fleshly life.

"Aha!" cried Bill, and he fumbled with the straps of his rucksack, "I find it in my heart to sit at stout that I may meditate upon the scene."

Open broken land stretched to the south marked by convenient paths and here I prefer to think the Fair was held. I cast about for the Slough of Despond and was rewarded by finding a marshy bit of ground close by the road. Certainly Christian, if he had not been lost in meditation, could have steered around it without disaster. Far off against the south arose the misty horizon of the Delectable Mountains. We argued whether in such a pious place it would be proper to apply at the tap and fall among thirsty sinners; but on inquiry we found we were out of hours and the bar was closed.

Beyond Shalford we saw St. Martha's Chapel on a hill, famous in pilgrim days. This chapel and St. Catherine's nearer Guildford were supposed to have been built by two sisters. They had only one hammer, but as magic was common in those days, first one sister drove a nail then hurled the hammer to the other who drove a nail. And so, turn and turn about they worked, tossing the hammer back and forth across the hill.

In four miles, near Albury where Martin Tupper wrote his "Stephan Langton," a novel of murder and many swoonings, we turned a few paces from the highroad to see the Silent Pool; for a dozen persons had warned us not to miss it. Its waters, so they said, lie so snugly in a wooded hollow that even in the wind its surface stays as glass.

In the very name there had sounded something of Keats a silent pool where Endymion may once have slept, "full of sweet dreams, and health and quiet breathing"-where maidens came to bathe at dawn

and the creatures of the tempest paused to catch their image in the dark unruffled water. And so I hoped that there might be a lurking presence in the hollow— the shadow of pleasant ghosts that haunt a poet's dream. Have I not said that spirits dwell forever on the hills about Killarney and that their step is heard when a cloud falls upon the moon? The mountains that tower above a southern lake are the prison walls of a thousand years of song that pack the night with echoes. What quality resides in quiet waters that it contains these mild specters of the past? Eagerly we approached the Silent Pool.

"I don't see much in this," said Beezer, when we had pushed through a gate and stood beside the water.

For our fancy had run too high and as was inevitable the lake was a disappointment. In its state of nature it must have been of rare beauty. An upper pool runs off to one below, and both are set deeply in the trees which shield it from the storm. But a pavilion had been built with names scratched upon the planking and the paths were worn with picnics.

"Look!" said Bill, "There is a bottle lying at the bottom.'

"Stout?" asked George.

"Bless my soul, it is. I think better of the spot,' said Bill. "Its patrons are persons of good taste."

The pool's better days were lived before the char-àbanc soiled the highroads, and even now a band of restless tourists sought out an empty space of bark to carve their names.

We had lunch at Shere a mile to the east, a village