e associated
with the singing of nightingales. Perhaps the nightingales dislike the
association; at all events, I am told that they have deserted St. Anne's
Hill. If they have, it is a strange conclusion to the years of close
protection which a former owner of St. Anne's Hill extended to her
birds. The late Lady Holland would never have a singing bird killed nor
a nest touched in all her grounds, and if one of them was found dead in
any of the shrubberies, her orders were that it was to be given a prompt
and respectable burial. Jays and magpies, however, she could not abide,
nor crows and rooks, and a curious story is told of a rookery which
these birds tried to establish near the house. Every year they decided
to build in a particular tree, and every year they were shot or
otherwise driven away. At last Lady Holland died, and the gardeners
gladly laid aside their guns. The very next spring the rookery was
firmly established, and has cawed its paeans ever since.

[Illustration: _A Byway near Weybridge._]

CHAPTER XVII

WEYBRIDGE

A Georgian village.--The Kembles.--A prophetic lament.--Wey no
more.--The Brooklands bucket.--Exiles.--Riddles of spelling.--A
royal palace.--The Duchess's Monkeys.--Oatlands cedars.--Portmore
Park.--St. George's Hill.--The Leveller's Beanfields.

There is a pleasant melancholy in trying to imagine a Georgian
Weybridge. Fanny Kemble describes the village as she saw it as a girl,
before the railway came. Then, in the twenties, it was "a rural, rather
deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain
of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on
the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former
residence of the Duke of York." Eighty years have gone, and the
deserted-looking village has spread into a town and suburbs covering
more than a square mile of ground; Portmore Park has vanished; Oatlands
is a hotel. The railway has created one more residential neighbourhood.

Fanny Kemble first came to Weybridge as a fifteen-year-old school-girl,
and spent three summers with her family at Eastlands, a little cottage,
still to be seen, on the outskirts of the village, of which she has
written some amusing reminiscences. Charles Kemble, the actor, her
father, used to come down from Saturday to Monday, but had no great
appreciation of country life, or, perhaps, rather of the cottage, which
was too small for him; "h