Wimbledon will never belong to the town so long as it keeps its common. It is the wildest thing near London. It is almost as wild and lonely a place to-day as when in Georgian and early Victorian days statesmen and noblemen chose it as a fashionable and convenient ground for duelling. The common has seen more than one historic duel. The Duke of York and Colonel Lennox met there in 1789; the Duke received the Colonel's fire, and the ball grazed his hair, but he did not fire in return. Pitt fought a duel with a member of Parliament on Putney Heath north of the common in 1798; each fired twice at twelve paces and hit nothing. Sir Francis Burdett and Mr. John Paull fought in 1807, wounded each other and went back together to London in the same carriage. Canning and Castlereagh fought in 1809, and Grattan, two years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, received Lord Londonderry's fire and himself fired in the air. Another Grattan could meet another Irish peer to-day, and if they chose their places well, nobody would hear a pistol at all. The bracken and the heather slope into dells and valleys which would shelter three duels in a morning; you could deliver a salvo and hardly scare a nursery maid. But Wimbledon's longest acquaintance with firearms was in the days before the National Rifle Association moved to Bisley. Queen Victoria fired the first shot on July 2nd, 1860, when she pulled a scarlet cord and scored a bull's-eye with a Whitworth rifle; a red and white flag was shown in an instant, you read, and "three points were scored to the Queen of England." The last shot was fired in 1889. I went to that meeting as a schoolboy, and am even now filled with an awe that belongs to spacious days, remembering that we were told that on the last evening the whole camp was to give three great groans for "George Ranger," the Duke of Cambridge, whose duty it had been to declare the common unfitted for the distant probings of misdirected Martini-Henry bullets. Those concerted, resentful, thousand-throated groans seemed a tremendous nightly business; there were camp-fires, one imagined, from which the circular groan would ascend, a rumble which should expel a ministry, unseat a prince. Not very much came of the groaning, I suppose; certainly the Volunteers liked the Bisley ranges, next year, much better. But the old windmill, which looked on in its time at thirty full meetings, still surely misses the week when the dells and the long stretches of heather rattled from the first gun to sunset with the crackle of Martinis and match rifles. The windmill watches red-coated golfers to-day, playing to some of the prettiest greens in the south of England; but the days for the windmill were when the tents were white about the heather, and when they sold Stewart's Verniers where to-day a more leisured generation misses short putts. CHAPTER XLII THE SURREY SIDE