From Wotton one might go on by Abinger Hammer to Gomshall, but the natural round, perhaps, and certainly one of the loveliest walks in the county, is by Abinger Hatch and Friday Street to Leith Hill. But by neither way must anyone walking by these roads miss the Crossways, a mile west of Wotton Hatch, with its perfect little farmhouse and the stream running through the fields past Abinger Mill. The Crossways farmhouse--perhaps Mr. Meredith had the name in his mind when he imagined the most gracious of his heroines--is of all the Surrey farmhouses I know the most fascinating. It lies behind a high wall, which runs round a square little garden; you peep through a gateway covered with ivy, and find an old lichened, weatherworn house, with ornamented brickwork and latticed windows, a house which Evelyn's grandfather may have known, and would find to-day unaltered. Crossways farm is most like Slyfields, the old Jacobean house near Bookham, but it is smaller, and is, I think, perfect, whereas Slyfields is a fragment. Crossways, besides its delightful front, has a fine chimney stack, and a strange but most satisfying buttress which ties the house to the garden wall. The farm lies among pasture-lands through which rushes the prettiest possible little brook. It is the Tillingbourne, here a stripling, and never much bigger for that matter; but here it is the meadow-brook in its ideal form. It runs from a broken mill-wheel below an old hammerpond, past a cottage shaded by four noble yews, and then races through two meadows faster, I think, than any brook anywhere else in Surrey. The water runs with the deep sparkle of cut glass; forget-me-nots grow about it, and reed mace, and figwort and bittersweet; waterhens wander in the shaven grass of its brim, and dabchicks go plump in the current like cricket-balls. There may be trout in the stream here as there are by Albury, but I am sure it runs too fast and round too many corners for anybody to catch them. [Illustration: _Crossways Farmhouse, Abinger._]