h Tudor windows with bas-reliefs
between them; in the foreground of the park a great lady rides in a
chariot with gaily caparisoned horses; a greyhound bounds by her side,
spaniels in leash drag a huntsman after the carriage; in the far
distance, beyond the palace, hounds and men hunt a noble stag, pictured
as if the whole airy chase flew round a cupola. It was a great palace,
and it should be standing to-day, with its lead and its gilt and its
Rubenses and Holbeins. But Charles II gave it to Barbara Villiers, and
she knew the right use for a king's gift.

Cheam, east from Ewell by two miles, has kept not the tower of its old
church but its chancel. The little building stands apart in the
churchyard; you may peep through a grille at the tombs and the pedigree
of sixteen generations of Lumleys, and at a palimpsest brass mounted on
a screen. But if Cheam's church has gone, in the village there is still
the White Hall, a gabled Elizabethan house of painted timber; the
daintiest and lightest little place, with tiny ordered lawns under its
white wood, and old-fashioned flowers in the garden and in the windows.
White Hall has the graces of old books, old ladies, old lace. But its
gables and chimneys are not the only happy picture in Cheam. The road
that passes by the left of the house leads to an untouched corner of
little, white wooden cottages, as lowly and as English as anything in
deep Surrey country, and this is nearly town. They will not last long, I
am afraid; the new Cheam buildings are staring at them.

All above Cheam and Ewell are Banstead Downs, once as free and open as
the downs by the Sussex sea, and even now sunny places where you may
walk in fresh winds. But the houses are nearer every year, and they will
be lucky if they escape another asylum; the high ground gives an
opportunity to asylum architects. On Banstead Downs are Lambert's Oaks,
where Lord Derby's roystering guests founded great races with bumpers of
claret, and where Lord Stanley, when he married Lady Betty Hamilton,
gave his famous Fete Champetre, which Horace Walpole guessed would cost
L5,000; Lord Stanley had "bought all the orange-trees round London," and
the haycocks he imagined were to be made of straw-coloured satin.
Banstead itself, like Woodmansterne, its neighbour to the east, has not
much to show of village buildings. Banstead and Woodmansterne churches
have many memorials to the Lamberts, one of the very old Surrey
families; and it is