as only
a little after ten o'clock when we passed the quaint-looking hotel
there, but already at least a dozen motors were drawn up before it. I
wanted to go in and ask if they show the room Lord Nelson used; but we
had too many things to see.

Of course, I am always wishing for you, but I began to wish the hardest
just as we came into this green, brackeny, fairyland of Surrey. It's the
kind of country you love best; although I must say it was never planned
for motors. Winding through those green tunnels which are the Surrey
lanes, I felt as if, in some quaint dream, I were motoring on a
tight-rope, expecting another car to want to pass me on the same
rope--which naturally it couldn't!

It would have been much worse, though, if Young Nick had been driving.
That little, smooth brown face of his looks as if its idol-simper hid no
human emotions, and I believe if people and animals were perfectly flat,
like paper dolls, so that they would do no harm to his car, he wouldn't
mind how many he drove over. Luckily, however, they _aren't_ flat, and
the only thing earthly he adores, after his master, is his motor; so he
is nice and cautious for its sake. But the Dragon thinks of everyone,
and says there's no pleasure for him in motoring if he leaves a trail of
distress or even annoyance along the road as he passes. He slows down at
corners; he goes carefully round them; he almost walks Apollo in places
where creatures of any kind may start out unexpectedly; and he blows our
pleasant musical horn as if by instinct, never forgetting, as I'm sure I
should do.

As we twisted and turned through the Surrey lanes, between Dorking and
Shere, little children in red cloaks and tams appeared from behind
hedges, looking like blowing poppies as they ran. And blue-eyed,
gold-brown haired girls in cottage doorways, under hanging bowers of
roses, were as decorative as Old Chelsea china girls. The red tiles of
their roofs, as I turned back for one more glimpse, would already be
half hidden in waves of green, but would just show up like beds of
scarlet geraniums buried in leaves.

Shere was almost too beautiful to be real, with its rows of Elizabethan
cottages whose windows twinkled at us with their diamond-shaped,
diamond-bright panes, sparkling under their low, thatch-eyebrows, from
between black oak beams. The Tudor chimneys were as graceful as the
smoke wreaths that lazily spiraled above them, and the whole effect
was--was--well, inexpres