A country town.--Peter the Great's breakfast.--Pykes in the Wey.--Dogs and fish-carts.--Off to Botany Bay.--Owen Manning.--A most malignant priest.--Eashing Bridges.--Peperharow deer.--Loseley from a distance.--Charterhouse in the future. The best view of Godalming is from the hill roads above Farncombe. Not many towns group themselves so well against hills and woods; few have so spacious and quiet a foreground. The church stands on the Wey; the churchyard runs down to the very banks, and the noble leaded spire lifts its chanticleer higher, I think, from the tower than any other church in Surrey. Between the foot of the hill and the Wey spreads wide meadowland; the Wey flows tranquilly by willow-herb and alder; beyond the Wey are the red roofs of Godalming clustered in the trees. It is the completest little country town; the green fields in front and the woods beyond set it compact together, clustered as a country town should be about its church and its High Street, with the river running clear at its side. [Illustration: _On the Way to Godalming from Haslemere._] Godalming High Street has not kept the grace of Guildford, nor had it ever the width and the air of Epsom or Farnham, but it has more than one building of distinction, and its links with the past are in old inns, timbered stories and forgotten courts. The White Hart still juts its wooden beams over the pavement; the King's Arms, a later building, has a square-set front which has watched many coaches jangle off to Portsmouth. The King's Arms has had more than one king as a guest. The Emperor Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William of Prussia dined there in the year before Waterloo; a more famous and a more greedy monarch who knew the King's Arms was Peter the Great in the days of Queen Anne. He had a suite of twenty with him, and the record of his bill of fare for the day is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I have not seen it, but the historians who have supply abounding details. Peter and his twenty had for breakfast besides side-dishes, half a sheep, half a lamb, ten pullets, a dozen chickens, seven dozen eggs and something over a quart apiece of mulled wine, with a gallon or so of brandy. Dinner was a better meal; three stone of ribs of beef was the main dish, with a sheep, a lamb, and a couple of joints of veal to help it out; capons and rabbits tempted the jaded, and four dozen of sack and wine made up for what was lacking at breakfast. [Illustration: _The Town Hall, Godalming._]