then comes the Crown's inability to pay up; next stoppage of supplies; eventually, settling up and a new contract. The Evelyn mills made the last pound of powder for the King in 1636, and then under protest. Charles was used to protests. So far very little powder had been made at Chilworth. The Evelyn mills were at Godstone--possibly near Wotton also. But it was the Chilworth powdermills which broke the Evelyns' business. Immediately on coming to the throne Charles I gave leave to the East India Company to set up powdermills on the skirts of Windsor Park; but the mills frightened the deer and were moved to Chilworth. Here, apparently, Sir Edward Randyll owned or built a large number of mills, which he leased to the Company, and it was the competition of the Company which silenced Evelyn's mills. But the Company was equally unsuccessful in keeping the business. Charles I was struck with the idea of turning shopkeeper himself, and gave the sole Government contract to one Cordwell, from whom he bought powder at 7-1/2d. the pound and sold it to the lieges at eighteenpence. That did not last long. The Long Parliament assembled in 1641, and the monopoly was abolished. From that date anybody might make gunpowder, and Surrey ceased to be the single centre of the industry. But the Chilworth mills still did a great deal of business--sometimes bad business. Sir Polycarpus Wharton, who had a twenty-one years' lease under Charles II, James II and William III, is said to have lost L24,000 over the mills, simply because he could not get paid by the Government, and actually went to a debtor's prison. Fifty years ago the industry had declined almost to a vanishing point. It revived in 1880, when experiments were made in new powders for heavy guns, and to-day the Chilworth Mills make cordite, without the miserable consequences which befel Sir Polycarpus Wharton. It seemed worth while, at the risk of spattering the page with dates and facts of gunpowder dryness, to attempt this short sketch of the Surrey gunpowder industry, if only to escape from the confusion of current legends. Chief among the traditions of the Chilworth mills is that which makes them the property of John Evelyn of Wotton. No Evelyn owned a powdermill at Chilworth, and John Evelyn of Wotton, though he may have owned a casual mill or so elsewhere, is not the John Evelyn who owned and worked the Godstone mills. Those mills belonged to the diarist's grandfather, George Evelyn, and to George Evelyn's son and grandson, both named John. The latter was the diarist's cousin. I ought to add that I am indebted, for most of this history of gunpowder, to the admirable article on the subject by Mr. Montague Giuseppi, published in the Victoria History of the County.