The Pilgrims' Way dropping down like white ribands over the shoulder of the down into Reigate we have already seen. On the other side of the town the high road climbs up again to the crest of the ridge--a road paved and metalled to stand the perpetual wear of shod wheels grating down the hill. At the highest point of the road is one of the finest views in England; one of the finest, Cobbett thought, in all the world. The red roofs of the town cluster among trees below; beyond is all the Weald to the Devil's Dyke and Chanctonbury Ring, best of all landmarks of the Sussex downs. The separate views of the Weald along the chalk ridge have each their own characteristic, from the Hog's Back to the heights above Titsey. For me the view from the hill above Reigate has a double memory; the purple and blue of the downs seen through the stems of the beeches that line the crest, and the shadows thrown by a high summer sun in the parks and fields below. The oaks and elms set themselves in the open grass with little circles of darker green about their feet, like the wooden stands of the trees of a Dutch toy farm. Redhill joins Reigate to the east, new, red, spreading, a junction of railways, a better sort of Woking. You do not have to wait from nine minutes to three-quarters of an hour every time you come to Redhill. To the schoolboy it has the merit of being a stage on the road from London and the sea. CHAPTER XXXIV CROYDON Croydon Palace.--A Neglected Relic.--Queen Elizabeth's Waiters.--John Whitgift.--Hospital, chapel, and school.--A Record of Cricket.--Macaulay's tyrant.--Izaak Walton differs.--Queen Elizabeth's Little Black Husband.--Croydon colliers.--John Ruskin.--By the Parish Pump.--John Gilpin. Croydon is best reached by rail. It cannot be called a convenient centre, for one returns to centres, and Croydon has little that would recall a traveller. But it is an easy point of departure either for the country east, by Addington and the Kentish border, or south through Sanderstead to Coulsdon and Chaldon, or west by Beddington and the Carshalton trout ponds to Epsom. You may walk in any direction, except perhaps north, where you will walk into North Croydon. But in Croydon itself there are still two or three things worth seeing.