e was as nearly as possible too high and too
wide, too long and too large, for every room in the house." But Fanny
Kemble herself and her mother enjoyed the country to the full. Mrs.
Kemble had a passion for fishing, and she and her children used to spend
her days on the banks of the Wey, apparently with the slightest possible
success.

A curious relic remains of the Kembles' Weybridge holidays. This is to
be seen in the Eastlands' cottage garden, and is a semi-circular heap of
earth or sand planted with trees and shrubs. Once, when it was much
larger and higher, it was "the Mound," and was the favourite playground
of the Kemble girls and boys. It grew out of a huge heap of sand which
the landlord refused to move, and which Mrs. Kemble therefore planted
and cut into shape with a walk round the top. Naturally enough,
tradition has grown up round this heap of sand. Fanny Kemble was a
famous actress, and lived here as a child; therefore this mound was a
theatre. It is locally known indeed as "the theatre." But I can find no
evidence that it was ever used as anything of the kind; certainly Fanny
Kemble never refers to it as a theatre, nor as anything else but a
"domestic fortification" and a "delightful playground." To her it is
always "the Mound."

[Illustration: _Weybridge._]

If that charming and brilliant lady could revisit these glimpses of the
moon, what would she say of that infinitely larger "mound" and its
surroundings in the new motor track, with which it is Weybridge's
unhappy fate to be linked to-day? Nearly a square mile of quiet meadow
and forest and hill slashed and scarred and scarped into a saucer of
cement; acres of pine and cedar and oak and rhododendron smashed and
sawn to fragments; the roar of thundering Napiers and Hotchkisses, where
once the reed-warblers climbed the meadowsweet and cuckoos called from
the willows--how would she have addressed the originator of that
staring blatant racecourse? Strangely enough, she saw something of the
kind befall her beloved Weybridge pinewoods sixty-seven years ago, and
wrote of it in her diary. She was staying as a guest at Oatlands, and
found one of her favourite walks among the Brooklands trees destroyed.
Her outcry is prophetic:--

"O Lord King, Lord King (we were riding through the property of the
Earl of Lovelace, then Lord King), if I was one of those bishops
whom you do not love, I would curse, excommunicate and anathematize
you for cut