Kingston has kept little of the past. An old alehouse, old almshouses, an old staircase, an old roof or two by the market place, and an old chapel, Lovekyn's, standing apart--the survivals are the loneliest things. Lovekyn's, once a chapel, and now a school, is one of the links. Gibbon was a scholar there, and Gibbon belongs doubly to Surrey; he was born at Putney. But the changes at Kingston have made it almost all new, and the changes have come quickly. Only three or four years ago the quaint, small Harrow Inn had two companions, the Anglers and the Three Compasses, one with a fireside corner to warm ale and tell grandfathers' tales in, the other with traditions of highwaymen and the road. They were pulled down. In Market Place there was once a fine Tudor house, the Castle Inn. The noble staircase remains, a good, thoroughgoing piece of carving of Bacchus and full casks; the house has gone. The church is old enough to have seen these and other losses; but the church is a mixed building; the tower, or most of it, is eighteenth century brick. Only one spot in the open streets of the town, I think, keeps an air of Kingston as the customers of the Castle Inn may have known it, and that is the little byway through which runs the water splash of the Hogsmill river. Cart horses standing in the ford, and bare-legged children fishing for minnows, are what Kingston saw in the old days. The Stone remains; the Stone on which tradition says that the Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned. Once it stood in the chapel of St. Mary, a Saxon building adjoining the church; but St. Mary's Chapel fell in 1730. It was moved to the Market Place; afterwards in 1854, to the open space where it now stands opposite the Court-house; on the very spot, they say, where there was once an Anglo-Saxon palace. The railing which surrounds it has been described as "of Saxon-like design," and perhaps that should suffice. On the pedestal which bears up the Stone are the names of the kings who were crowned on it: Edward the Elder, Ethelstan, Edmund, Edred, Edwig, Edward the Martyr, and Ethelred the Unready. What is the Kings' Stone? A morasteen, the archaeologists tell you; one of a circle of stones, on which the chief sat in council with his great men; the predecessors of the Anglo-Saxon chiefs would have been Arch-Druids, perhaps, or pontiff kings, acclaimed by ancient Britons centuries before the Romans set foot in Kent. [Illustration: _Kingston Bridge._]