Years ago Haslemere had a lion. It was an old beech tree, twenty feet in girth, and the late Louis Jennings, in his _Field Paths and Green Lanes_, tells us that since Murray's _Handbook_ spoke of a lion, he searched for it for long, and when he found it he was disappointed. To-day it is a stump, or is said to be, but nobody could show it me; I am sure I looked for it longer than Louis Jennings, but I never found it. All I found was what will perhaps some day grow into another lion--a beech tree and a holly apparently growing from the same root. [Illustration: _A Porch at Haslemere Church._] Haslemere's history is mostly political, and not always very respectable. Elizabeth, perhaps, made the village a borough; at all events, two members sat for Haslemere first in the Parliament of 1584, and two members represented the borough until it was unkindly abolished by the reforms of 1832. Some of its members came of old Surrey families--Carews, Mores, Oglethorpes, Onslows, Evelyns; and some of its elections were highly irregular. One of the most successful pieces of jobbery stands to the credit of the year 1754, when the Tory sitting members, General Oglethorpe and Peter Burrell, were opposed by two Whigs, James More Molyneux and Philip Carteret Webb, a London lawyer. Molyneux and Webb were elected by 73 votes to 45, but some at least of the 73 (perhaps also some of the 45) would not have borne strict investigation. Eight of the winning votes were faggot votes manufactured out of the Cow Inn, of Haslemere, which inspired Dr. William King, Principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, to a ballad of forty-two verses, entitled _The Cow of Haslemere, or The Conjurer's Secretary at Oxford_. Dr. King liked politics in poetry to be hot and strong, thus:-- "No Man could hear, But he must fear Her loud infernal Roar, Such horrid Lies, And Blasphemies She bellow'd out and swore. But what must make The stoutest quake, And all with Horror gape, At one strange Birth, This Cow cast forth Eight Calves in human Shape. For in this Cow Each did somehow A Tenement possess, How big this Beast Must be at least From hence, Sirs, ye may guess. The Crew march'd out, An horrid Rout, No Bear's Cubs could be bolder! Each calf did vote, And swear by Rote He was a good Freeholder."