medicinal, as if it ran,
troubled only of angels, from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's
work is never given, nor, I suppose, will be; nor will any joy be
possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of English
waters."

Things are not quite so bad to-day. Ruskin himself had the smaller pool
cleaned and set about with stone, and planted with periwinkle and
daffodils. The other two larger pools are the care of a district
council, which forbids attempts to catch the big trout that cruise in
their clear, weedy waters, and otherwise looks after them for a public
which may value them more highly than in Ruskin's day, but drops in a
great many newspapers. Another so-called well--Anne Boleyn's well; her
horse put its foot into soft ground above a spring--is a well no longer.
Iron railings ward off the profane, and narcissus and ivy cluster round
its brim, but below, according to the weather, is dust or mud.

At the churchyard gate are the trunks of two ancient but still living
elms, to which is fastened a beam beset with hooks, which either hold or
once held joints of meat for the butcher's shop behind. The church,
which is a strange mixture of old and new, the new being gradually built
on to the old, is the resting-place of Gaynesfordes and Ellenbrygges,
two of the great old Surrey families, and contains at least one
remarkable inscription:

"M.S. Under the middle stone that guards the ashes of a certain
fryer, sometime vicar of this place, is raked up the dust of William
Quelche, B.D., who ministred in the same since the reformation. His
lot was through God's mercy to burn incense here about 30 years, and
ended his course Aprill the 10, an. dni 1654, being aged 64 years."

Mr. Quelche was vicar in troublous times, and the distractions of the
Civil War led to a hiatus in the parish registers. The fault lay with
the parish clerk, but the conscientious Mr. Quelche felt bound to clear
himself in the eyes of future ages by a long apology in the Register of
baptisms, which begins beseechingly enough:--

"Good Reader tread gently:

For though these vacant yeares may seeme to make me guilty of thy
censure, neither will I symply excuse myselfe from all blemishe; yet
if thou doe but cast thine eie uppon the former pages and se with
what care I have kepte the annalls of mine owne tyme, and rectifyed
sundry errors of former times thou wilt beginn to thin