XIII SARA HOLNEY 161 only part of Witley will stand the full glare of sunlight. The new cottages are finely designed, but they are too blackand-white and painty to group easily with the older, mossier buildings and the White Hart Inn, with its nobly ugly sign. The church, bowered in ivy and roses, has some quaint inscriptions. One commemorates a forgotten office :— 'Off yor charite pray for the soulle of Thomas Jonys and his wyfe Jane, which Thomas was one of the Sewers of the Chamber to oure Soverayne lorde Kynge Henry VIII." A Sewer of the Chamber waited at the table and brought water for the hands of the guests an office which suggests an obvious rhyme for poets writing of water-jugs. Another epitaph is a shining example of the proper manner of attributing to the dead an almost crushing superfluity of virtues. Sara Holney, first in Latin, and then in English, thus is lamented and extolled : "A better woman than here sleeps, there's none, One more name attracts. Mehetabel, daughter of John Leech of Lea, died in 1816. She was doubtless a friend of Cobbett, who often rode by Lea, and greatly admired her father's trees. The first Mehetabel was the wife of the king of Edom, and the last, possibly, is the heroine of the Broom Squire. Witley has perhaps been a little overshadowed by the tragedy of a late owner of Lea Park. I have heard descriptions of the new features of Lea Park, the lakes and fountains and a billiard-room, I believe, under water, but I have not seen them. Before Hindhead drew authors and artists up the hill, Witley had its own settlement of workers living deep in Surrey country. George Eliot was at Witley Heights; J. C. Hook, who could not bear to be watched while he was painting, sketched Witley gorse and heather; Birket Foster long lived among the Witley pines; and Mrs. Allingham, who was at Sandhills, a house near by, has painted few more interesting pictures than her Lessons, Pat-a-cake, and The Children's Tea. M 162 CHILDREN AND APPLE-BLOSSOM CH. XIII At Witley she painted most of her studies of children indoors, in the nursery and the schoolroom; after she left Witley, she liked to set her cottage girls and boys among bluebells and appleblossom out of doors. A corner in the White Hart, Witley, known as George Eliot's corner. CHAPTER XIV THE FOLD COUNTRY The Wild Garden of Surrey.-Birds and their valentines. - Nightingales at Dunsfold. —Alfold Stocks.—Three yews in a line.—The King's Evil. —Alfold industries.—A_dry _canal.—Chiddingfold.-Red brick and Madonna lilies.-The Enticknaps.-Hungry scholars.-The Crown Inn.-On Highdown Ball.-A green ride in the woods.-The Chiddingfold Foxhounds. THE "Fold Country" is the wild garden of the Surrey weald, and the month to walk in it is May. Alfold, Ifold, Durfold, Dunsfold, Chiddingfold, and other "folds " lie among oakwoods and ploughlands that once were oakwoods; the railway runs nowhere nearer than seven miles from the heart of the woods, and in the woods the timbered cottages stand apart, old and tranquil. To me, the associations of the "Fold Country" centre round the memory of a First of May hotter and more glorious with flowers than any I can remember. I had started to walk from Baynards Station west among the woods, with the recollection of four days of north-east winds and heavy snow that had brought April to a close. The change was incredible. There, in the roads that ran through the oakwoods and hazel copses, it was the heat of summer. The birds had drawn new valentines. A cock chaffinch, gayest of suitors, danced round his demure hen in the roadway, careless of any pedestrian in that deep country; wrens crept like mice among the stubs of the hedge; the grass by the roadside and the ditch was lighted with primroses. A narrow copse of cut hazel, bordering the road on the Sussex boundary, was a carpet of primroses, anemones, milkmaids, and dog violets; spires of purple orchids stood above shining celandines; there could have been nothing 163 164 DUNSFOLD NIGHTINGALES CHAP. more brilliant in a garden. On the hedge-bank a hen pheasant rustled through the undergrowth, caught sight of me, crept to a rabbit-scratch and crouched on the brown earth within a yard of my hand; for the birds are tamer in the Fold Country than beyond it. Above other hedge-banks, in other copses, the cuckoos called all that morning, from Sussex to Surrey, over the border road. Two of the Fold Country farm-houses by that road, framed in that sunny setting, belong to the memories of a Surrey May. One is a timbered house twenty yards in Sussex, with white curtains and flower-pots behind its diamond-paned lattices, and clumps of primroses growing about stone causeways up to the very door. The other is Pallinghurst farm, a mile further on the road, whose long, lichened roofs shelter red-tiled walls and masses of ivy round a white doorway; the garden is a cluster of gnarled apple-trees, and over it and about the tall farm chimneys, when I saw it that morning, flew the first swallows of the year. But it was not the swallows that made summer that May-day. Beyond Alfold, on the road that runs out of Sidney Wood up to Dunsfold Common, there are coppices of thick undergrowth, set about orchards of greylichened fruit-trees and stretches of low cut hazel sheeted with primroses. There I heard the first nightingale of the year, a single jet of song as the brown tail flickered in the covert; a hundred yards further down the road there were three singing together; Dunsfold Common came in a burst of yellow gorse, and the song of a nightingale thrilled up from the gorse ; another bird, beyond Dunsfold, sang high in the hedge-row in full sunlight. That is a Dunsfold lane, for me; a wild plumtree branching out of the hedge dressed with the whitest of delicate blossom, and in the white blossom, with the hot blue of a May sky beyond and between, a nightingale's throat throbbing with singing. Alfold almost touches the Sussex boundary, and is perhaps the most out-of-the-way little village in Surrey. I find Mr. Ralph Nevill, writing in 1889, lamenting that it was once charmingly rural, but that "the breath of the pestilence has passed over and vulgarised it." There are new houses in it, and new generally means hideous; but the pestilence has left some old work worth looking at. At the eastern end of the village stands Alfold House, a sixteenth-century timbered building ; XIV KING JAMES'S MIRACLES 165 at the western end is the church, grey with its shingled spire, built like Thursley and Elstead on massive oak beams. A broad stone causeway leads to the door; in May, the springing grass shines with daffodils. Alfold, like Shalford, Abinger and Newdigate, still has its village stocks. They stand at the churchyard gate, better worth sitting in, so far as appearance goes, than the other three. Alfold, too, has a great old yew-tree, one of a row of three in the Fold churchyards. Has it ever been noticed that the Alfold, Dunsfold, and Hambledon yews stand almost in a mathematically straight line? From Alfold to Hambledon is five miles as the crow flies, and Dunsfold is almost exactly half way between the two. Three Alfold villagers, perhaps, made the journey to London, or to some halting-place in the royal progress, to seek the grace of King James II. The parish register-book contains the entry of their names on the title-page : 2 May 1687 { I gave certificates to Jane Puttock, Henry Manfield, Elizabeth Saker, to be touched for the [King's] Evil. Whether Jane Puttock, Henry Manfield and Elizabeth Saker were cured of the scrofula by the highly medicinal contact of the royal hands does not appear; but in 1710 another patient, James Napper, was certified to be "a legal inhabitant of our parish of Alfold in the county of Surrey aforesaid and is supposed to have the disease commonly called the Evil." Perhaps not one of the four had much more than the country bumpkin's natural desire to see the King and be able to talk about it afterwards; perhaps they coveted the little gold tokens which royal physicking hung round the sufferer's neck. Not all those who were touched for the Evil were languishing with a fell disease. Charles II operated on nearly a hundred thousand of his lieges, with instant success when there was nothing the matter with them. But Anne, the divines held, did not succeed directly to the throne, and therefore did not succeed to the miraculous powers of the Jameses and Charleses. It was very little good for James Napper to go to London, for, practically speaking, the queen could cure nobody. Alfold, which in Aubrey's day was Awfold-variant |