Between Egham and Thorpe to the south is one of the few fine Elizabethan houses in the county, pleasantly named Great Fosters. But even Great Fosters, with all the charm of its gables, its chimneys and its mullioned windows, does not stand in quite such sharp contrast to the garishness of the Holloway buildings as the little village of Thorpe itself. Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard. But neither Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all Surrey villages, can surpass Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and quiet brooding over the past. Enter Thorpe from the north by the fields, and you will walk by lanes over which a hundred years have passed without adding a tile or a tree to cottages or cottage gardens; and in Thorpe itself you can sit near the church on the edge of a stone stile, and look round at walls and roofs which might surely have sheltered Sir John Denham himself, walking by Thorpe to Chertsey. The stile stands across an ancient right of way, which crosses the fields; a straight line from the churchyard to Chertsey. John de Rutherwyk, doubtless, often walked or rode that lonely byway; perhaps it was he who raised the level path dry and well-drained out of the swampy, snipe-haunted meadows that lay between the little church and the great Abbey. [Illustration: _Thorpe._] South of Chertsey to the Wey is rather uninteresting country. Addlestone lies between Chertsey and Weybridge, though not in a direct line, and was the home for years of two octogenarian authors, each of whom had a pension from the State, and who between them wrote or edited over five hundred books--Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Anna Maria Fielding. Both are buried at Addlestone; so is Fanny Kemble's mother, Mrs. Charles Kemble, who as Mademoiselle Decamp had delighted French theatres. But Addlestone's great possession is still living, the huge Crouch Oak which spreads vast branches over ground where Wycliff is said to have preached, and Queen Elizabeth to have dined. Once the Crouch Oak stood to mark the bounds of Windsor Forest; and up to years not long gone by love-lorn young women gathered its bark to boil down into philtres to ensnare the hearts of unwilling swains. [Illustration: _The Crouch Oak, Addlestone._] At Anningsley Park, two miles away, lived Thomas Day, author of _Sandford and Merton_; Thomas Day, who took a foundling child of thirteen and named her Sabrina, and educated her to be his wife--a position which she, at an age to marry, refused. His fate was perverse to the end. He taught himself to dance, wooing another lady who spurned him; and, teaching himself to ride, he was thrown and killed. CHAPTER XIX CHOBHAM AND BISLEY