ouring towns are marked, for
instance, with the direction in which they lie as the crow flies--an
admirable idea, due to the generosity of Mr. T.W. Erle of Bramshott
Grange, brother of the Sir William Erle who put up the granite cross
which stands close by. It will be safer, in future, perhaps, to trust to
the ordnance map rather than the disc for the exact figures, for some of
them have already been nearly rubbed out, and Cockney names have been
scratched on the brass. There they remain, the only gibbet on Gibbet
Hill.

Prose-writers have had much to say about Hindhead, among them the late
Grant Allen, who pleased a not very exacting public with the not always
accurate natural history of "Moorland Idylls," and shocked it with
Hill-top novels. But I think no poet has written of the hill, unless it
is Charles Kingsley, who surely had climbed Hindhead and looked out on
the view from its bracken and heather when he wrote _Airly Beacon_. It
was one of the first poems he made after coming to Eversley, and it
breathes the scent of June fern in the air and sun:--

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
Oh, the pleasant sight to see
Shires and towns from Airly Beacon,
While my love climbed up to me!

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
Oh, the happy hours we lay
Deep in fern on Airly Beacon,
Courting through the summer's day!

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon;
Oh, the weary haunt for me,
All alone on Airly Beacon,
With his baby on my knee!

Of other writers, Mr. Baring-Gould has come nearest to catching the
spirit of the moorlands and the breeze that sometimes drifts up over
Hindhead from the great glen which local myth has named the Devil's
Punch Bowl. The _Broom Squire_ is strangely unsatisfactory as a novel,
or I find it so, with its entire needlessness and inconsequence of plot.
But it has something in it of the heather and the wind, of the sand of
Thursley and the steam of the Punch Bowl on a wet day; and you may still
meet broom squires if you like to wander down into the deep of the glen.
The best broom squire is, I think, Kingsley's, in _My Winter Garden_:--

"The clod of these parts is the descendant of many generations of
broom squires and deer stealers; the instinct of sport is strong
within him still, though no more of the Queen's deer are to be shot
in the winter turnip fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited
hook hung from an orchard bough. He n