Hindhead is the most superb and the most disappointing thing in Surrey. A quarter of a century ago it was wild moorland; then Professor Tyndall proclaimed that since he could not go to the Bel Alp, he would go to the next best place, and from that day the hill has changed to streets, villas, and hotels. London arrives every Saturday: London swarms on Sunday. But you can still see, or can guess, something of the grandeur and loneliness of the place; best, perhaps, on the east and the northern slopes towards Thursley; most fully, alone on the highest point, Gibbet Hill. Hindhead, before the town came there, had a grisly sound in the name. The Hindhead murder has grown from a sordid case of robbery and killing into one of the great crimes of English local history. Nothing would have seemed less likely to the murderers. Probably not one of them could read or write; perhaps any sensible calculation of the chances of escape was beyond them; possibly they never planned the murder at all. Their crime, in a sense, was paltry; if it had never been discovered, there would have been no further consequences; no one but the murdered man, so far as can be told, was injured; the man was never missed nor owned by a friend. The murder of a king reshapes history; an assassinated Minister may change a Constitution; the killing of this man, apparently, mattered to no single living soul. Yet his murderers, in all their clumsiness and ignorance, contrived a crime which should be talked of daily for a century, and should have its separate, distinct record in stone when a thousand plots and passions of regicides and usurpers should be as clean forgotten as if their record had never stained blank paper.