Although not one of the highest of Surrey hills, St. George's Hill provides a series of delightful glimpses of distant scenery through the trees. Windsor Castle stands up like a battleship on the horizon to the north-west, twelve miles away: west lie the rolling open spaces of Chobham Common and Bagshot Heath; south-west Guildford and Godalming stand over the shining valley of the Wey; Ranmer Church spire marks Dorking to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpassed by a dozen others. It is the deep quiet of the place; the sound of the wind in the trees, even on windless days, like the sound of the sea in a shell; the scented pine-needle carpet, crinkling in the sun; the bracken and bluebells of May, and the crimsons and purples of June's profuse rhododendrons. CHAPTER XVIII NORTH TO RUNEMEDE Virginia Water.--Ruined Temples.--Grebes and Pheasants.--Bishop's Gate.--Shelley's "Alastor."--"Perdita" at Englefield Green.--Mrs. Oliphant's Neighbours.--Runemede rolled.--Egham's Almshouses.--Sir John Denham.--Frightful Monuments.--King Charles and the grateful stag.--The quiet of Thorpe.--The Crouch Oak.--Love Philtres. [Illustration: _Ruins at Virginia Water._] There is no better way of roaming through north-west Surrey than to take the train to Virginia Water station, which is as near as you can get to the county boundary by the railway, and then to set out almost along the boundary northwards till the Thames turns the road south again at Runemede. Virginia Water itself lies more than a mile from the station, and is not at its best on Saturdays and Sundays. On quieter week days there is no lovelier stretch of woodland lake-water. It is, of course, not a natural sheet, but its designer had skill enough to know what would not look unnatural. He was Thomas Sandby, Royal Academician and Deputy-Ranger of Windsor Park, and one of the great landscape gardeners of Georgian days. He planned the lake for the Duke of Cumberland, Ranger of Windsor Park after Culloden, and he made it by choking back a number of small streams that trickled through a reedy marsh, and so spreading a single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or June, when the green leaf is high on the beeches or the copper leaf strewn below them, and in any month of the year the thick, deep moss of the open glades is a carpet to delight to walk upon. But not all Sandby's