n the stream,
double-wheeled and doubly silent; swans oar themselves leisurely about
the eddies, and the meadow beyond in May is a sheet of kingcups.

[Illustration: _Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham_, A.D. 1432,
_restored_ 1635.]

"Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham, 1432, restored 1635," is the
engaging legend painted on a low-roofed timbered house which stands at
the churchyard gate. With its square beams, its latticed windows and red
curtains, it is a model of what a "Home of Rest for Gentlewomen"--which
is its vocation--should be. Cobham has one or two other good houses,
Georgian, red and solid, but the best perhaps is the old White Lion
posting inn at Cobham Street, half a mile away on the Portsmouth Road.
The White Lion stood by the fourth tollhouse on the highway from London,
and its oak-panelled parlours have entertained travellers for four
centuries or more--none thirstier, perhaps, than "Liberty" Wilkes, who
passed that way on a day in 1794, and drank "a large bowl of lemonade."

Pain's Hill, which rises above the Mole a little further on the road, is
a name associated with a gardener and a poet. The gardener was Charles
Hamilton, who burdened his lawns with such an astonishing variety of
temples, chapels, grottos, castles, cascades and ruins--including a
hermitage with a real live hermit--that the result was voted one of the
greatest achievements in landscape gardening of the Georgian or any
other age. The hermit, sad to relate, was a failure. He was offered L700
to live a Nebuchadnezzar-like existence in his cell, sleeping on a mat,
never speaking a word, and abandoning all the conveniences of a toilet.
He would gladly have taken the L700, but threw up his post after three
weeks.

The poet was Matthew Arnold, who spent most of the last fifteen years of
his life at Pain's Hill Cottage. He wrote little poetry there; he came
to Pain's Hill in the year after he had published _Literature and
Dogma_, when his mind was occupied with his revolution against the
sombreness and narrowness of modern English religious thought. But to
Pain's Hill, I think, belong "Geist's Grave" and "Kaiser Dead" and "Poor
Matthias;" "Geist's Grave" written for his little son, and "Poor
Matthias" for his daughter, perhaps--Matthias, bought at Hastings to
please a child, though she, childlike, would have chosen a bigger
bird:--

"Behold
French canary-merchant old
Shepherding his flock of gold
In a l