m
the Way again at Guildford. The old British track probably kept to the
northern ridge; the pilgrims who visited Guildford may have left by the
same road, but they turned away across the valley to the little chapel
of St. Martha, which stands on a hill two miles south-east of the town.
The pilgrim's track to the chapel, vanished in parts, becomes plain
enough when it crosses the road which now runs from Guildford to
Chilworth west of the chapel by perhaps half a mile. Here it is a wide
smooth path of the finest down grass, cropped close by rabbits, with
which all this breezy hill must be alive by night. Nearly at the top the
path breaks into sand, which must have tested the less elastic of the
travellers to the shrine pretty severely, but the sand breaks again into
an open plateau of as fine grass as the path below. On this plateau
stands the little church, alone in the sun and wind.

[Illustration: _St. Catherine's Chapel, Guildford._]

Sixty years ago St. Martha's was a ruin; as unhappy a little building as
St. Catherine's on the hill beyond the Wey. It was restored in 1848, and
has taken out of the past a quiet and serenity that set it in the old
years, in tranquil sunshine, in the peace of English Sundays. All the
winds blow about it; it is alone in its acre of smooth down grass;
within its churchyard wall are the graves of country labourers and their
children, lowly mounds hardly seen, without the memory of a name, at one
with the purpose of the earth they dug and sowed. Pine trees stand round
the open space of the hill; bluebells in May spread a film under them;
beyond the grasses, heather and ling die from August purples to the
bronze of autumn. The Surrey hills are to the south and west; farthest
on the horizon is the faint blue of the Sussex downs.

There are early Norman walls and arches in the restored chapel. St.
Martha's may be one of the three churches which Domesday assigns to the
manor of Bramley, belonging to Bishop Odo of Bayeux. A less trustworthy
tradition is that Stephen Langton is buried there; the lids of the old
stone coffins found in the chapel when it was restored probably account
for that legend. Martin Tupper accepted the legend as history.

St. Martha's chapel has inspired more than one poet, Tupper among them,
but none have written with more charm on the lonely little building than
Mr. Sidney Allnutt, in a poem which was published in the _Spectator_
last year. Here are six stanzas out o