Aprill the 26^th 1658. Heare was taken a vagrant, one Mary Parker, Widow with a Child, and she was wipped according to law, about the age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the place of her birth, that is in Grauesend in Kent, and she is limitted to iiij days, and to be carried from Tithing to Tything tell she comes to the end of the s^d jerney. A reformer of prison discipline, who was a native of Godalming, would have read the entry with rage. General Oglethorpe, founder of the colony of Georgia, and originator of the inquiry into the state of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons, was born at Westbrook in Godalming forty years after Godalming beat the woman through its friendless streets. We meet General Oglethorpe at Haslemere; perhaps if he had lived earlier he would have dared to lift his hand against the savage Elizabethan law. How could a town assent to such shame, and yet maintain on its outskirts an almshouse? Godalming's almshouse is a long low building of red brick, standing behind a white gate and some elms on the road by Farncombe. It was founded by Richard Wyatt, a rich Londoner, three times Master of the Carpenters' Company, and the inscription over the entrance stands as he made it:-- "This Oyspitall was given by M^r. Richard Wyatt of London, Esq.: for tenn poore men w^th sueficient lands to it for y^ier mayntenance for eve^r, 1622." [Illustration: _Eashing._] Farncombe is Godalming's suburb, and from above its hilly streets can be had a strangely romantic view of the valley by Guildford, with St. Martha's chapel crowning the hill. From Farncombe, too, you may take one of the prettiest walks of all by the Wey, through rich fields of grass ennobled with bordering elms, and with the Wey running here level with you through meadowsweet and iris, and here below the footpath, seen through the trees. If you push up stream, you will come to Eashing Bridge, one of the oldest and strongest of Surrey bridges, and now a national possession, secured from attacks of brick and iron by the Society for Preserving Places of Historic Interest--an admirable Society. Eashing Bridge, or rather Bridges, for it crosses the Wey twice, and has more than five buttresses standing in the water, has stood over the Wey for more than seven centuries. The old engineers perhaps built over a stronger Wey than to-day's, for they made the buttresses that point up stream to divide the water; on the other side they are round and blunt. The time to stand on Eashing Bridge is when it is quietest, on a Sunday morning. Up stream is the mill, humming out one of the best of all songs of water; to the left is a row of timbered cottages, cream-painted brick and black beams, and gay when I saw them on a blue August morning with sweet peas and dahlias; a villager and his wife gathered fruit in a garden banked above the road, and white-frocked, black-stockinged children sat demurely in the cottage doorways.