erings
in store for kings and other rich people, and the way they go out
hunting and shooting and not caring for anybody, and then the spectres
come at them and they see how empty life is. Even to-day those ruddled
drawings can set a spell. Stare at them, and the little church calls
back its preacher and his flock; there, in the pulpit, he stood,
gesturing at the dragon and St. Margaret; here, below him, sat the
quiet-hearted countrymen, wondering in the solemn Sunday sunshine; here,
perhaps, a child, hearing the story for the first time. St. Margaret
must have been more difficult than the Kings. She begins well enough,
and she goes on well--the village maidens would doubt whether they would
have the strength to refuse an Olibrius. Then the deliverance from the
devil would do admirably; the bumpkins would swallow that as easily as
the devil swallowed St. Margaret. But how to go on? How to explain the
failure of Providence afterwards? The preacher must have slurred that,
and got on quickly to the wings of the dove.

Two great Surrey families belong to Charlwood. One is the line of
Sander, or Saunder, settled at Charlwood as early as Edward II, and
still surviving, in name at all events, in the neighbourhood. It was
Richard Saunder who placed in the church the delicate fifteenth-century
oak screen, the most beautiful in the county; but a more famous member
of the family was Nicholas Saunder, Regius Professor and Jesuit Divine,
over whose writings many good churchmen quarrelled. The other family are
the Jordans of Gatwick, almost as old as the Saunders, and like them
surviving in cottage life to-day.

[Illustration: _Godstone._]

CHAPTER XXXVIII

GODSTONE AND BLETCHINGLEY

The White Hart at Godstone.--Cobbett's
violets.--Bletchingley.--Beagles and Foxhounds.--Dr. Nathaniel
Harris.--Begging the Love of Neighbours.--A gratious woman.--Swift
and a gentle prelate.--Bletchingley manor.--The Master of the
Revels.--An English gentleman's Armour.--How to be buried.--Posing
for a tombstone.--Nutfield.--Fuller's earth and its new uses.

The key to the east of Surrey is Godstone. It is true that the village
itself lies more than two miles from the railway station which bears its
name, but which might equally well have been named Tandridge or
Crowhurst. But there is no other centre in East Surrey from which so
many other villages and places of interest are easily reached. To the
west, a mile and