t a museum
should hold, from Celtic pottery to caterpillars, told me when I was at
Haslemere that he had seen a pair (I write in 1908) only two years ago.
He was not at all certain that there were no more blackcocks in the
county. But I fear the villas have been too much for them.

The church stands a little apart from the town, and holds two very
different memorials. One is the Burne-Jones window to the memory of
Tennyson, who lived at Aldworth on Black Down over the border; the other
is a strange, rough heap of peat and heather, piled inside the gate of
the churchyard. Under it lies John Tyndall. He was one of the
discoverers of Hindhead as a place to live in instead of merely a hill
to climb; the tragedy of his death is a recent memory. It was his wish
that his grave should be no more than a mound of heather, but such
wishes can end unhappily. If the grave is neglected, perhaps that is
what he hoped it would be; but neglect, can grow into something worse.
When I last saw the grave--perhaps on an unfortunate day--the heather
had somehow collected newspapers and empty jampots; it looked like soon
becoming a rubbish heap.

A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ visited Haslemere in 1801 and
described the painted glass in the windows. One of them he catalogued
thus:

"Offering of the Wise Men. Among the numerous presents, I
distinguished some fine hams, poultry, and mutton."

A recent inspection fails to distinguish among the numerous presents
either fine hams or mutton.

Years ago Haslemere had a lion. It was an old beech tree, twenty feet in
girth, and the late Louis Jennings, in his _Field Paths and Green
Lanes_, tells us that since Murray's _Handbook_ spoke of a lion, he
searched for it for long, and when he found it he was disappointed.
To-day it is a stump, or is said to be, but nobody could show it me; I
am sure I looked for it longer than Louis Jennings, but I never found
it. All I found was what will perhaps some day grow into another lion--a
beech tree and a holly apparently growing from the same root.

[Illustration: _A Porch at Haslemere Church._]

Haslemere's history is mostly political, and not always very
respectable. Elizabeth, perhaps, made the village a borough; at all
events, two members sat for Haslemere first in the Parliament of 1584,
and two members represented the borough until it was unkindly abolished
by the reforms of 1832. Some of its members came of old Surrey
families--Carew