Leaving Windsor--Eton, its History and its Worthies--The College Buildings--Windsor Park--The Long Walk--The Albert Bridge--Datchet and Falstaff--Old Windsor--"Perdita's" Grave--The Tapestry Works--The "Bells of Ouseley"--Riverside Inns--The Loves of Harry and Anne Boleyn--Magna Charter Island--Runnymede--The Poet of Cooper's Hill--Fish at Bell Weir--A Neglected Dainty--Egham and Staines--John Emery--Penton Hook--Laleham--Dr. Arnold--Chertsey--The Lock and Bridge--Albert Smith and his Brother--Chertsey Abbey--Black Cherry Fair--Cowley the Poet--A Scene from "Oliver Twist"--St. Ann's Hill--Weybridge--Oaklands and the Grotto--Shepperton Lock and Ferry--Halliford--Walton--The Scold's Bridle--Sunbury--Hampton--Moulsey Hurst and its Sporting Associations--Hampton Court Bridge. The course of the beautiful river as it glides onward from Windsor to Hampton might provoke many a quaint historical conceit, as other rivers have done less aptly. We drift on the tide of Thames, as on the tide of Time, away from the Norman to the Plantagenet, from the Plantagenet to the Tudor; and it is the life of England that we can scan as the waters flow past scenes which, through all the mutations of the ages, through all the seasons' difference, year after year, are ever freshly, strongly, characteristically English. From the Conqueror's steep-throned stronghold; past the ait and meadow associated deathlessly with the solemn declaration that "no freeman shall be seized, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way destroyed"--"nor condemned, nor committed, to prison excepting by the legal judgment of his peers or by the laws of the land;" past more than one memorial of the mild king whose piety and love of learning founded Eton College; and still onward, far onward, along the fluvial current of history, till we reach the stately and substantial record of another and a later Henry, last of that royal name, and opposite in all respects of character, temperament, and will to the weak and gentle Plantagenet. From Windsor, then, and from Eton's distant spires; from the playing-fields, the bathing-places, the Brocas, and Firework Eyot; from the fisheries, too, which exist on the same spots they occupied eight hundred years ago--for wherever a fishery or a mill is named in Domesday Book, there it will generally be found, as of yore--we turn reluctantly, and not until a lingering look has been cast back on the old familiar scenes. Our way is on the river, or by its side, the towing-path being a track which pedestrians may follow with pleasant ease. But here and there the land may win us astray; and at the very commencement of our jaunt there is more to interest us ashore than afloat. Not that the river hereabout lessens in charm. On the contrary, its winding beauty is almost at its height. But that very beauty half depends on prospects which lead our thoughts inland; and inland we must