a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there with the white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes; which, having neither energy to cart away, nor decency enough to dig into the ground, they thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health. And, in a little pool behind some houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria, and bricklayer's refuse, on one side, which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond: and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men with one day's work could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm; and every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled only of angels, from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor, I suppose, will be; nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of English waters." Things are not quite so bad to-day. Ruskin himself had the smaller pool cleaned and set about with stone, and planted with periwinkle and daffodils. The other two larger pools are the care of a district council, which forbids attempts to catch the big trout that cruise in their clear, weedy waters, and otherwise looks after them for a public which may value them more highly than in Ruskin's day, but drops in a great many newspapers. Another so-called well--Anne Boleyn's well; her horse put its foot into soft ground above a spring--is a well no longer. Iron railings ward off the profane, and narcissus and ivy cluster round its brim, but below, according to the weather, is dust or mud. At the churchyard gate are the trunks of two ancient but still living elms, to which is fastened a beam beset with hooks, which either hold or once held joints of meat for the butcher's shop behind. The church, which is a strange mixture of old and new, the new being gradually built on to the old, is the resting-place of Gaynesfordes and Ellenbrygges, two of the great old Surrey families, and contains at least one remarkable inscription: