ur eye in
Bletchingley will be a foxhound. The kennels of the Burstow Hunt are at
Smallfields, near Horley, but the puppies introduce themselves to other
lodgings. Another abiding feature of Bletchingley is its cobbled
gutters. The quiet, sunny main street is one of the broadest of all
Surrey village roads, and its gutters drain it admirably. It lies
between low and comfortable old houses, of which the White Hart is the
chief, as becomes an ancient and notable inn. The White Hart when I saw
it last was welcoming a couple of foxhounds; another strolled across the
road careless of a hooting horn; another stood in a shopdoor. But of all
that belongs to the past in Bletchingley the best lies away from the
main road. Brewer Street is the name of an offshoot of Bletchingley to
the north, and contains one of the most perfect small timbered houses in
the county--the gatehouse of the old manor.

[Illustration: _Old Timbered House near Bletchingley._]

Bletchingley has been given a bad character by Cobbett. "The vile rotten
borough of Bletchingley," he calls it, and adds, from a Godstone inn,
that it is "happily for Godstone out of sight." Long before Cobbett the
Bletchingley politicians were in hot water. One of them, Dr. Nathaniel
Harris, was rector of the parish in the early days of the Stuarts, and
took his politics with him, as other clergymen have done, into the
pulpit. A Mr. Lovell was the candidate he wanted in for Bletchingley,
and he did his best for a canvass. He preached a sermon specially
directed against persons who would not vote for Lovell; he took his text
out of Matthew--"Now the chief priest and elders sought false
witnesses"; and he referred generally to his opponents as lying knaves.
It must have been inspiriting to hear him. His candidate got in, but
there was a petition against him for bribery, and Dr. Harris got into
trouble. He had to kneel at the bar of the House of Commons and humbly
confess his fault and pray for pardon, and on the next Sunday he had to
confess again in church, and to beg for the love of his neighbours.

The Reform Act ended Bletchingley as a borough. It had been bought in
the reign of Charles II by Sir Robert Clayton, and was just as flagrant
a job as Gatton or Haslemere; generally a Clayton sat for it. In the
Clayton era there were not many more than a dozen electors, but the
numbers who turned out at an election were remarkable. The inns set out
their barrels in the streets, free