a thousand lights attend
The wretch who living saved a candle's end."

But those legends belong to paper and books. They are less easily
destroyed than an epithet engraved on a stone; but who of deliberation
would carve an insult, as this is carved, for a dead man?

[Illustration: _The Golf House and Windmill, Wimbledon Common._]

Wimbledon will never belong to the town so long as it keeps its common.
It is the wildest thing near London. It is almost as wild and lonely a
place to-day as when in Georgian and early Victorian days statesmen and
noblemen chose it as a fashionable and convenient ground for duelling.
The common has seen more than one historic duel. The Duke of York and
Colonel Lennox met there in 1789; the Duke received the Colonel's fire,
and the ball grazed his hair, but he did not fire in return. Pitt
fought a duel with a member of Parliament on Putney Heath north of the
common in 1798; each fired twice at twelve paces and hit nothing. Sir
Francis Burdett and Mr. John Paull fought in 1807, wounded each other
and went back together to London in the same carriage. Canning and
Castlereagh fought in 1809, and Grattan, two years after Queen Victoria
came to the throne, received Lord Londonderry's fire and himself fired
in the air. Another Grattan could meet another Irish peer to-day, and if
they chose their places well, nobody would hear a pistol at all. The
bracken and the heather slope into dells and valleys which would shelter
three duels in a morning; you could deliver a salvo and hardly scare a
nursery maid.

But Wimbledon's longest acquaintance with firearms was in the days
before the National Rifle Association moved to Bisley. Queen Victoria
fired the first shot on July 2nd, 1860, when she pulled a scarlet cord
and scored a bull's-eye with a Whitworth rifle; a red and white flag was
shown in an instant, you read, and "three points were scored to the
Queen of England." The last shot was fired in 1889. I went to that
meeting as a schoolboy, and am even now filled with an awe that belongs
to spacious days, remembering that we were told that on the last evening
the whole camp was to give three great groans for "George Ranger," the
Duke of Cambridge, whose duty it had been to declare the common unfitted
for the distant probings of misdirected Martini-Henry bullets. Those
concerted, resentful, thousand-throated groans seemed a tremendous
nightly business; there were camp-fires, one imagined, from which