forlornest
possession of all, the north chantry is paved with a tessellated floor
which was made in prison, I was told, by an unhappy woman who hoped that
forgiveness would take and use her work. Merstham has had some famous
rectors. One was the great Thomas Linacre, King's Physician to Henry VII
and Henry VIII, founder of the Royal College of Physicians, and friend
of Melanchthon and Erasmus. He became a priest when he was fifty-eight,
four years before his death, and was only Rector of Merstham for a
month. "I much wonder," Fuller writes of him in his _Worthies_, "at what
I find in good authors, that Linacre a little before his death turned
priest and began to study the Scriptures with which he was formerly
unacquainted, in so much that reading the fifth, sixth and seventh
chapters of St. Matthew he vowed, '_That_ either this was not the Gospel
or we were not Christians.'"

Another rector, Robert Cole, once was a nonconformist, especially in the
matter of ecclesiastical vestments, but eventually got rid of his
objections. Ecclesiastical Commissioners then decided to have an object
lesson in properly dressed clergymen at Lambeth. Mr. Cole was dressed in
full clerical attire, and was then "placed as the front figure at the
meeting, while the chancellor of the Bishop of London thus harangued the
auditory: 'My masters and the ministers of London, the Council's
pleasure is, that ye strictly keep the unity of apparel, like to this
man as you now see him; that is, a square cap, a scholar's gown,
priestlike, a tippet, and in the church a linen surplice.'" The auditors
then had to sign "Volo" or "Nolo," and those who refused were deprived
of their livings. Poor Mr. Cole, priestlike in his tippet, cuts a meeker
figure than another Merstham rector, James Samborne. This reverend
gentleman was actually supposed to possess supernatural powers, and when
a thief climbed up a pear-tree in the rectory orchard, Mr. Samborne went
in pursuit, fixed his gaze upon the robber from a suitable distance and
from where he stood, using dreadful arts, fastened the robber in the
tree.

Another walk from Croydon, for those who like a string of little old
churches, and an occasional fine view, would be by Addington to the
south-east through Sanderstead to Warlingham, or further south to the
edge of the chalk ridge at Woldingham. The railway is never very far
off. There is nothing imposing among these hillside hamlets; they leave
an impression of t