On a day of light mists one may see the view from the hill as Denham knew it, and as it was seen and known by Surrey nobles long before his day. For below the hill lies Runemede, and it needs the filmy gauze of mist to spread the meadows and trees of the Thames banks into a green carpet, untouched with the mark of the builder and the roadmaker. But Runemede is not seen best from the hill. Best, I think, you can measure that broad green floor by coming on it as King John might have come had he ridden or rowed from Windsor. Then it stretches suddenly before you, a level plain of springing grass, a single rich hayfield in June, as perhaps John looked out over it on the day he sealed the Charter. The meadow and the river can have changed little in seven hundred years, and perhaps the farming of the meadow is not wholly different. But I shall always remember the shock with which once I came upon Runemede on an open day in March, when the farmers' men were out over all the fields with the horses and the farm machinery. Runemede was being rolled. South of that great meadow, Egham stands opposite Staines, separated by the river and a mile of dull road. Egham may have once had attractions, but they have nearly all disappeared. Nothing old or quiet could live near the Holloway College. A building of such appalling pretensions sears its neighbourhood like a hot iron. The town takes colour from its flamboyant arrogance; the local builder studs his rough-cast with glass, red and green and blue. Two old almshouses stand by the main street of the town; one, a lowly set of cottage rooms, built by Sir John Denham in 1624, crouches quietly apart; the other, two hundred years younger, but still good Georgian brick, stands behind a gateway in grounds which, when I saw them last, were a miracle of untidiness. The almshouses, were rebuilt in 1828, when perhaps the grass round them was mown also. Epitaphs and monuments can be dull enough, but no one could call the monuments dull which family piety has erected in Egham church to the memory of Sir John Denham, father of the poet. Sir John, clothed in a shroud, quits his tomb at the Last Trump; below him, among skeletons and skulls, two grisly corpses writhe to the light. It is edifying to conceive the satisfaction with which Sir John's descendants must have feasted on such horrors every Sunday. A gentler memory lives on a stone erected "to the most dutiful, engaging, and tender child of seven years old. Miss Sarah Honywood"; and a finer epitaph is Garrick's, written to the memory of Thomas Beighton, a former vicar:-- "He had no foe, and CAMDEN was his friend." [Illustration: _Entering Egham._]