The popularity of a poet can hardly be gauged by the number of visitors to the haunts wherein he passed his day. Rather are they numbered by the proximity of a railroad thereto. Consequently it is not surprising that the pilgrims to the little out-of-the-way Buckinghamshire village where Milton completed his _Paradise Lost_ are an inconsiderable percentage of those who journey to Stratford-on-Avon. For though Chalfont St. Giles lies only a short distance away from the twenty-third milestone on the high-road from London to Aylesbury, it is some three miles from the nearest station--a station, too, where few conveyances are obtainable. Motor cars which will take the would-be pilgrim in an hour from a Northumberland Avenue hotel may increase its popularity, but at present the village of the "pretty box," as Milton called the house, is as slumberous and as little changed as it was in the year 1665, when Milton fled thither from his house in Artillery Ground, Bunhill Row, before the terror of the plague.[4] Milton was then fifty-seven, and is described as a pale, but not cadaverous man, dressed neatly in black, with his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk-stones. He loved a garden, and would never take a house, not even in London, without one, his habit being to sit in the sun in his garden, or in the colder weather to pace it for three or four hours at a stretch. Many of his verses he composed or pruned as he thus walked, coming in to dictate them to his amanuensis, and it was from the vernal to the autumnal equinox that his intermittent inspiration bore its fruit. His only other recreation besides conversation was music, and he sang, and played either the organ or the bass viol. It was at Chalfont that Milton put into the hands of Ellwood his completed _Paradise Lost_, with a request that he would return it to him with his judgment thereupon. It was here also that on receiving Ellwood's famous opinion, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?" he commenced his _Paradise Regained_. He returned to London after the plague abated, in time to see it again devastated by the fresh calamity of the great fire. An engraving of this house appears in Dunster's edition of _Paradise Regained_, and an account in Todd's _Life of Milton_, p. 272; also in Jesse's _Favourite Haunts_, p. 62. [Illustration: 6. THE WALLER OAK, COLESHILL _From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist._ Painted 1902.]