lies higher than any town in the
south of England--or is said to do so; I have not measured them all. I
think Tatsfield and Woldingham in the east of the county lie higher; but
they are villages, not towns. Haslemere is between five and six hundred
feet above sea level; as high as Newlands Corner and nearly three times
the height of St. George's or St. Anne's Hill. If Hindhead were sliced
away, Haslemere's view to the north would be superb.

[Illustration: _Haslemere._]

Haslemere has strayed higher and higher on the slopes above the old
town. The core lies round a broad street in which the White Horse faces
the Swan, and the town hall stands between them, a rather dull little
building, in the middle of the road. The town has kept less of the past
than Farnham; perhaps it had less to keep; but it has some good red
seventeenth-century houses, weather-tiled gables, and tall brick
chimneys. Toadflax and arabis climb over the old garden walls: one
little house looks as if its walls were held together by coils of
wistaria. In another, a square, comfortable building with an elaborate
doorway, lived the water-colour painter and wood engraver, Josiah Wood
Whymper, father of the Whymper whom a later generation knows best as a
painter of animals and game birds.

The most interesting interior in Haslemere is the museum. It was
presented to the town by Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, and teaches history,
geology, botany and everything to do with Haslemere's (and other) birds,
beasts, and reptiles. You may study the development of the world from
the birth of life perhaps thirty-one million years ago--that is the age
Haslemere teaches--down to the present day. Skulls of elephants,
antelopes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, gorillas and giraffes instruct
the zoologist; local vipers and grass snakes curl in spirits of wine;
stuffed quadrupeds, including a large kangaroo, illustrate climates
foreign to Haslemere; local ornithologists contribute cases of the birds
of the neighbourhood. Witley sends a case of crossbills; twenty years
ago a pair of hen harriers--or are they Montagu's harriers?--were killed
on Hindhead; a blackcock guards his grey hen, and was shot not far away.
Are blackcock extinct in Surrey? The last Lord Midleton wrote to _The
Times_ some years ago to state his belief that they were. At Frensham I
was told that the last pair were shot in 1889. But Mr. E.D. Swanton, the
curator of the Haslemere Museum, learned in everything tha