ut roses.--Shrove Tuesday football.--Dorking's glory.--Jupp at
Cotmandene.--An earthquake.--Giant and Dwarf.

Dorking has twice had history made for it, and travellers come to visit
the scenes. It was in the bar of the Marquis of Granby at Dorking that
Sam Weller met his mother-in-law, and watched the reverend Mr. Stiggins
make toast and sip the pineapple rum and water, and advised Mr. Weller
senior as to the best method of treating Shepherds with cold water.
Pilgrims cross the Atlantic to visit the Marquis of Granby. No Dorking
inn bears the name, nor ever has; but Americans will tell you that the
Marquis is only a name Dickens invented to cover the identity of the
White Horse, which fronts the cobbles of Dorking High Street with its
gables and white and green paint much as it must have done in the time
of Dickens. Dickens himself, in _All the Year Round_--he did not sign
the article, but in that paper none but he might have written of that
inn--conceived "the Markis" to be the King's Head, in the old days a
great coaching house on the Brighton Road. It stood at the corner of
High Street and South Street, and in South Street to-day you may still
gaze at its unhappy walls and windows. The old lattices are boarded up,
smashed with stones; the rooms are empty. When the post office came to
stand at the corner, the King's Head became a tenement house; afterwards
a ruin.

The Battle of Dorking took place on the ridge north of the town in 1871,
and resulted, after the invasion, in the conquest of Great Britain by
Germany. It all came about perfectly simply. A rising in India had taken
away part of our army; war with the United States over Canada had taken
another 10,000 troops, and half of what were left were dealing with a
Fenian revolution in Ireland. Germany put to sea and sank our fleet with
torpedoes, a new and dreadful engine of war; then the German army landed
and the end came at once. At least, it would have come, if Sir George
Chesney, who described the battle of Dorking in _Blackwood's Magazine_,
had prophesied truly. He lived till 1895, to see more than twenty years
after his battle pass without an invasion; but the battle, for some of
his readers, became a very real thing. The late Louis Jennings, in his
_Field Paths and Green Lanes_, tells us that he had a friend who,
believing most people to have very hazy notions of history, was in the
habit of saying, "Of course you remember the battle of Dorking? Well,