At Wadhurst are many iron grave slabs and a graceful slender spire. The massive door bears the date 1682. A high village, in good accessible country, discovery seems to be upon it. London is not so near as at Crowborough; but one may almost hear the jingling of the cabs. FOOTNOTE: [3] Weever's _Funeral Monuments_. CHAPTER XL TUNBRIDGE WELLS Over the border--The beginnings of the wells--Tunbridge Wells to-day--Mr. George Meredith--The Toad and other rocks--Eridge--Trespassing in Sussex--Saxonbury--Bayham Abbey--Lamberhurst--Withyham--The Sackvilles--A domestic autocrat--"To all you ladies now on land"--Withyham church--The Sackville monument--John Waylett--Beer and bells--Parish expenses--Buckhurst and Old Buckhurst--Ashdown Forest--Hartfield and Bolebroke--A wild region. I have made Tunbridge Wells our last centre, because it is convenient; yet as a matter of strict topography, the town is not in Sussex at all, but in Kent. In that it is builded upon hills, Tunbridge Wells is like Rome, and in that its fashionable promenade is under the limes, like Berlin; but in other respects it is merely a provincial English inland pleasure town with a past: rather arid, and except under the bracing conditions of cold weather, very tiring in its steepnesses. No wonder the small victoria and smaller pony carriage so flourish there. [Illustration: _The Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells._] The healthful properties of Tunbridge Wells were discovered, as I record a little later, in 1606; but it was not until Henrietta Maria brought her suite hither in 1630 that the success of the new cure was assured. Afterwards came Charles II. and his Court, and Tunbridge Wells was made; and thenceforward to fail to visit the town at the proper time each year (although one had the poorest hut to live in the while) was to write one's self down a boor. A more sympathetic patron was Anne, who gave the first stone basin for the spring--hence "Queen's Well"--and whose subscription of _£_100 led to the purchase of the pantiles that paved the walk now bearing that name. Subsequently it was called the Parade, but to the older style everyone has very sensibly reverted. Tunbridge Wells is still a health resort, but the waters no longer constitute a part of the hygienic routine. Their companion element, air, is the new recuperative. Not that the spring at the foot of the Pantiles is wholly deserted: on the contrary, the presiding old lady does quite a business in filling and cleaning the little glasses; but those visitors that descend her steps are impelled rather by curiosity than ritual, and many never try again. Nor is the trade in Tunbridge ware, inlaid work in coloured woods, what it was. A hundred years ago there was hardly a girl of any pretensions to good form but kept her pins in a Tunbridge box.