tural course would seem to be to dig the stream a bed of
its own by the side of the road; but local ingenuity has preferred to
send the traveller dryshod over a stile through the field at the side of
the stream, which duly proceeds in the Ordnance map down the road it has
chosen.

[Illustration: _Horsell Church._]

CHAPTER XX

THE WEY VILLAGES

Old Woking.--Behind the Veil.--A Royal Palace.--Necropolis.--When
not to dig a grave.--"Lumpy" Stevens.--The Ripley Road.--The Anchor
and the Talbot Dog.--An Open Box.--Teal by Twilight.--Ockham.--Seven
Streams.--Newark.--Jackdaws two shillings the Dozen.--The Wisley
Garden.--Byfleet.--A Ghost in Velvet.

In whatever way you may choose to travel through Surrey, it is difficult
to avoid making Woking a centre and a rendezvous. All the trains stop
there; at least, I cannot remember ever passing through the station
without stopping, either to change trains, which generally takes three
quarters of an hour, or to wait in the station until it is time to go on
again, which usually takes eleven minutes. I never found anything else
to do at Woking, unless it were at night, when the railway lights up
wonderful vistas and avenues of coloured lamps. Then the platform can be
tolerable. Once when I had a long time to wait I walked out to the
church which stands rather finely on the ridge north of the railway. I
thought then it was Woking church: it belongs to Horsell. It was that
Woking, the Woking of the station, which for many years I imagined to be
the only Woking in Surrey. One did not wish for another.

But there is another Woking, and it is as pretty and quiet as the
railway Woking is noisy and tiresome. It stands with its old church on
the banks of the Wey two miles away, a huddle of tiled roofs and old
shops and poky little corners, as out-of-the-way and sleepy and
ill-served by rail as anyone could wish. I found it first on a day in
October, and walked out from the grinding machinery of the station by a
field-path running through broad acres of purple-brown loam, over which
plough-horses tramped and turned. It was a strange and arresting sight,
for over the dark rich mould there was drawn a veil of shimmering grey
light wider and less earthly than any mist or dew. The whole plough land
was alive with gossamer; and Old Woking lay beyond the gossamer as if
that magic veil were meant to shield it from the engines and the smoke.

Old Woking, indeed, lie