oners themselves. The stately brown geese stalk over
the lawns careless of poulterers or punt-guns. The cormorant, who most
certainly knows he is being watched, dives to show off before admiring
children. Even the blackbirds have forgotten their country habits, and
will sing when country blackbirds are silent for the year. Once, late in
July, I heard four singing in evening sunshine after rain. They would
take any countryman back to the days of chestnut blossom and the scent
of Surrey may; but that indolent melody, in July sunshine, belongs to
London.

[Illustration: _Kew Church._]

CHAPTER XXII

KINGSTON

Kingston Old and New.--The Stone.--The Sexton's Escape.--Throwing
over the Church.--Ducking a Scold.--Aaron Evans's shot at a
Cormorant.--The Dog Whipper.--A Feast of the Church.--Lord Francis
Villiers's fight.

[Illustration: _Kingston._]

Kingston has kept little of the past. An old alehouse, old almshouses,
an old staircase, an old roof or two by the market place, and an old
chapel, Lovekyn's, standing apart--the survivals are the loneliest
things. Lovekyn's, once a chapel, and now a school, is one of the links.
Gibbon was a scholar there, and Gibbon belongs doubly to Surrey; he was
born at Putney. But the changes at Kingston have made it almost all new,
and the changes have come quickly. Only three or four years ago the
quaint, small Harrow Inn had two companions, the Anglers and the Three
Compasses, one with a fireside corner to warm ale and tell grandfathers'
tales in, the other with traditions of highwaymen and the road. They
were pulled down. In Market Place there was once a fine Tudor house, the
Castle Inn. The noble staircase remains, a good, thoroughgoing piece of
carving of Bacchus and full casks; the house has gone. The church is old
enough to have seen these and other losses; but the church is a mixed
building; the tower, or most of it, is eighteenth century brick. Only
one spot in the open streets of the town, I think, keeps an air of
Kingston as the customers of the Castle Inn may have known it, and that
is the little byway through which runs the water splash of the Hogsmill
river. Cart horses standing in the ford, and bare-legged children
fishing for minnows, are what Kingston saw in the old days.

The Stone remains; the Stone on which tradition says that the
Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned. Once it stood in the chapel of St. Mary,
a Saxon building adjoining the church; b