There are few fairer counties in England than Surrey, and of Surrey the fairest portion is admittedly the extreme south-western edge which skirts Sussex to the south and Hampshire to the west. Travellers from London to Portsmouth by the London and South-Western Railway on leaving Guildford pass through the middle of the right angle which this corner makes, and cut the corner two miles beyond Haslemere almost exactly at the point where the three counties meet. As the steep rise of nearly 300 feet which has to be surmounted in the six miles which divide Witley from Haslemere is being negotiated by the train, the most unobservant passenger must be struck by the singularly beautiful wooded character of the country on either side, and by the far-extended view which is unfolded as the eye looks southward over the Weald of Sussex. It was to Sandhills, near Witley, that Mrs. Allingham came to live in 1881 with her growing family, and it was in this corner of Surrey that she found ample material for almost all her work during the next few years; and it is there that she has returned at intervals for the majority of those cottage subjects which the public has called for, ever since her first portrayal of them shortly after her commencement of landscape painting in these parts. Witley consists of groups of irregularly-dotted-about houses, which hardly constitute a village, and would perhaps be better designated by the proper name--Witley Street. A few years ago every one of the houses counted their ages by centuries, and were fitting companions of the ancient oaks and elms that shaded them. Some few are left, but the majority are gone, many so long before the term of their natural existence had run that it was a troublesome piece of work to destroy them. There is also an old "Domesday Book" Church. Drawings of almost all of the cottages, from the hand of Mrs. Allingham, are in existence somewhere or other, but she never seems to have painted this or other churches, having apparently little liking for them, as had Birket Foster. In the present case the omission to do so arose from the fact that in painting it she would have formed one of the occupants of half-a-dozen outspread white umbrellas, all taking a stiffly-composed subject from the same point of view. Sandhills, where our artist lived, is on the Haslemere side of Witley, on a sloping common of heather and gorse, topped with fir trees. From thence the view, looking southwards, extends far and wide over the Weald of Surrey and Sussex, Hindhead, a mountain-like hill rising behind, and Blackdown, a spur stretching out on to the Sussex Valley to the right. In the distance are to be seen the rising grounds near Midhurst and Petworth, Chanctonbury Ring with its tuft of trees, called locally "The Squire's Hunting Cap," and on a clear day the downs as far as Brighton and Lewes.