hundred thousand of his lieges, with instant success when there was
nothing the matter with them. But Anne, the divines held, did not
succeed directly to the throne, and therefore did not succeed to the
miraculous powers of the Jameses and Charleses. It was very little good
for James Napper to go to London, for, practically speaking, the queen
could cure nobody.

[Illustration: _A Surrey Byway._]

Alfold, which in Aubrey's day was Awfold--variant spellings of "old
fold"--was not always purely rustic and agricultural. There is a slab of
Sussex marble in the churchyard which is declared to cover the remains
of the last of the Surrey glass manufacturers--the "French glass men"
who are supposed to have carried on an illicit factory in the depths of
Sidney Wood. Another Alfold industry was smuggling, or assistant-smuggling.
"The gentlemen" ran their tobacco and brandy by way of some of the Alfold
farmhouses; the farmer left out "bread and beef" for the gentlemen, and the
gentlemen left kegs behind for the farmer.

Sidney Wood lies between Alfold and Dunsfold, and grows hazel and oak
for various industries, besides acres of the purest and palest
primroses. Through it runs a curious trackway, marked "disused" on the
Ordnance maps. It is a section of the Wey and Arun Junction Canal, now a
dry bed studded with hazel stubs and clumps of flowers. Dunsfold Common
joins the wood, and beyond it, round a wide green, stand the Dunsfold
cottages, seventeenth century mixed with twentieth. In the churchyard,
when I was there in May, I once saw a curious sight. From inside the
church the great yew seemed to be alive with bees; the noise was of
twenty swarms. I went out to find that they were not bees, but flies.
The western wall of the tower was black with them; so were the
gravestones and the gravel. There must have been millions, hatched, no
doubt, in the heat of the wooden belfry.

Dunsfold is too far from the railway to be crowded, but it is building
busily. The twentieth century is not as frightened of deep country as
Manning and Bray, who remark that "the common before coming to the
church is wide, and over it a road has been thrown up in a regular way,
and is tolerable, and a part near to Hascombe Hill has been done in the
same manner, but between them is a dreadful gulph." Dunsfold would
probably be thankful if to-day the "gulph" were wider.

From Dunsfold one may push on through Hascombe to rejoin the railway at
Milford or G