d, with a square tower, some fine windows, old
glass, a vestry curiously situated over the porch, and an interesting
brass.

The Bell Inn, in the village, is said to date from the fifteenth
century.

At Wadhurst are many iron grave slabs and a graceful slender spire. The
massive door bears the date 1682. A high village, in good accessible
country, discovery seems to be upon it. London is not so near as at
Crowborough; but one may almost hear the jingling of the cabs.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Weever's _Funeral Monuments_.

CHAPTER XL

TUNBRIDGE WELLS

Over the border--The beginnings of the wells--Tunbridge Wells
to-day--Mr. George Meredith--The Toad and other
rocks--Eridge--Trespassing in Sussex--Saxonbury--Bayham
Abbey--Lamberhurst--Withyham--The Sackvilles--A domestic
autocrat--"To all you ladies now on land"--Withyham church--The
Sackville monument--John Waylett--Beer and bells--Parish
expenses--Buckhurst and Old Buckhurst--Ashdown Forest--Hartfield
and Bolebroke--A wild region.

I have made Tunbridge Wells our last centre, because it is convenient;
yet as a matter of strict topography, the town is not in Sussex at all,
but in Kent.

In that it is builded upon hills, Tunbridge Wells is like Rome, and in
that its fashionable promenade is under the limes, like Berlin; but in
other respects it is merely a provincial English inland pleasure town
with a past: rather arid, and except under the bracing conditions of
cold weather, very tiring in its steepnesses. No wonder the small
victoria and smaller pony carriage so flourish there.

[Illustration: _The Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells._]

The healthful properties of Tunbridge Wells were discovered, as I record
a little later, in 1606; but it was not until Henrietta Maria brought
her suite hither in 1630 that the success of the new cure was assured.
Afterwards came Charles II. and his Court, and Tunbridge Wells was made;
and thenceforward to fail to visit the town at the proper time each year
(although one had the poorest hut to live in the while) was to write
one's self down a boor. A more sympathetic patron was Anne, who gave
the first stone basin for the spring--hence "Queen's Well"--and whose
subscription of _L_100 led to the purchase of the pantiles that paved the
walk now bearing that name. Subsequently it was called the Parade, but
to the older style everyone has very sensibly reverted.

Tunbridge Wells is still a heal