es a pond
through which the carthorses go plunging. But the town's most notable
building stands in the narrower road from the main street to the south.
This is the old Porch House, where Abraham Cowley, the poet laureate,
spent the last two years of his life, seeking in the solitudes of his
garden and the fields of his farm the rest and freedom which the
ingratitude of Charles II had forgotten to find for a faithful servant.
It was from Porch House that he wrote to John Evelyn, dedicating to him
his essay _The Garden_ with its pathetic opening:--"I never had any
desire so strong, and so like to covetousness as that which I have had
always, that I might be master at last of a small house and large
garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there
dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them and study
of nature." Cowley was no lover of the town. _The Garden_ holds his
philosophy:--

"Who, that has reason, and his smell,
Would not among roses and jasmine dwell,
Rather than all his spirits choke
With exhalations of dirt and smoke
And all the uncleanness which does drown
In pestilential clouds a populous town?"

His simpler pleasures were of the orchard and the farm. The husbandman
of fruit and flowers is king:--

"He bids the ill-natured crab produce
The gentler apple's winy juice;
The golden fruit that worthy is
Of Galatea's purple kiss;
He does the savage hawthorn teach
To bear the medlar and the pear.
He bids the rustic plum to rear
A noble trunk, and be a peach.
Even Daphne's coyness he does mock,
And weds the cherry to her stock,
Though she refused Apollo's suit,
Even she, that chaste and virgin tree,
Now wonders at herself, to see
That she's a mother made, and blushes in her fruit."

[Illustration: _Cowley's Cottage, Chertsey._]

Poor Cowley! The country was too much for him after all. Late on a July
evening, after helping his haymakers to get in their last loads, he was
soaked with a heavy summer dew. He caught cold and died, on July 28,
1667, and the Thames bore his coffin to burial in Westminster Abbey.

Less easy to find, if in some ways more familiar, than Porch House, is
the very house into which the unwilling Oliver Twist was thrust by Bill
Sikes mounted upon the stooping Toby Crackit. You can see the window
through which Mr. Sikes pointed the pistol, and the door from which
burst