dug coins, pottery, and a bronze mask. To-day the
villa may be visited, but it is overgrown by weeds and elder bushes, and
the visible remains are of scanty walls and tumbled pillars; rabbits, I
think, see most of it.

From Titsey you may climb a steep road and find Tatsfield church,
separated from its scattered village, clean on the edge of the steep
hill. Tatsfield church, which is old and small, stands nearly eight
hundred feet above the weald, and its little churchyard, with a path in
it leading to no gate, but only to a hedge, lends a curious sense of a
garden. The stretch of Sussex and Kent to the south is freer and wider
than any other Surrey church sees; but Tatsfield, like other places with
a fine view, suffers continual loss in cloudy weather. When I was last
there the church stood alone on the brow, over unguessable depths of
grey mist.

CHAPTER XLI

DULWICH TO WIMBLEDON

Growing London.--Cigars by Dulwich Valley.--Edward Allen, Actor,
Bear-baiter, Dog-fancier and Founder of a College.--Godd's
Guift.--Dulwich buttercups.--Dr. Johnson.--A Prayer in a
Library.--Merton.--Wimbledon Camp.--A Miser's grave.--An opportunity
for a duel.--Groans for George Ranger.--Memories of the Windmill.

Nothing is more capricious than a vast town pushing out into the
country. No law binds it; no power can resist it; it will not be
tempted, or denied; only one future can certainly be prophesied for it,
that where it comes it will remain. Looking at London and its
surroundings on a new map and an old, it is an arresting thing to
trace--almost to watch--the growth of the inexorable black ink on what a
decade or two before was inviolate white. There is nothing orderly about
it, nothing mathematical. London does not grow as the circles spread
from a splash in a pond, nor regularly and certainly as geologists say
stones grow in the soil--a fascinating and rather dreadful secret of
growth. London grows suddenly by fits and starts. Once, perhaps, the
town crept out quietly, a field at a time, a new road in a twelvemonth.
Now it catches great parks and manors. But which way it will go out to
catch them you cannot guess. It may walk threateningly, and it may leave
alone, as it has left the deepest of hayfields alone in Kent much nearer
London than in Surrey. One rule, perhaps, it keeps relentlessly; it will
never leave country between London old and London new. The Londons join
at once.

Ruskin, in _Prae