ountry at either end. The
high-road out of the town, stretching away for Hindhead and the South
Coast, comes slanting down athwart the valley, cutting it into "Upper"
and "Lower" halves or ends; and just in the bottom, where there is a
bridge over the stream, the appearances might deceive a stranger into
thinking that he had come to the nucleus of an old village, since a
dilapidated farmstead and a number of cottages line the sides of the
road at that point. The appearances, however, are deceptive. I doubt if
the cottages are more than a century old; and even if any of them have a
greater antiquity, still it is not as the last relics of an earlier
village that they are to be regarded. On the contrary, they indicate the
beginnings of the present village. Before them, their place was
unoccupied, and they do but commemorate the first of that series of
changes by which the valley has been turned from a desolate wrinkle in
the heaths into the anomalous suburb it has become to-day.

Of the period and manner of that first change I have already given a
hint, attributing it indefinitely to a slow immigration of squatters
somewhere in the eighteenth century. Neither the manner of it, however,
nor the period is material here. Let it suffice that, a hundred years
ago or so, the valley had become inhabited by people living in the
"peasant" way presently to be described more fully. The subject of this
book begins with the next change, which by and by overtook these same
people, and dates from the enclosure of the common, no longer ago than
1861. The enclosure was effected in the usual fashion: a few adjacent
landowners obtained the lion's share, while the cottagers came in for
small allotments. These allotments, of little use to their owners, and
in many cases soon sold for a few pounds apiece, became the sites of the
first few cottages for a newer population, who slowly drifted in and
settled down, as far as might be, to the habits and outlook of their
predecessors. This second period continued until about 1900. And now,
during the last ten years, a yet greater change has been going on. The
valley has been "discovered" as a "residential centre." A water-company
gave the signal for development. No sooner was a good water-supply
available than speculating architects and builders began to buy up
vacant plots of land, or even cottages--it mattered little which--and
what never was strictly speaking a village is at last ceasing even to
th