harmless when dancing on the rippled recesses of the river, but a bane to farming when it takes to a life on shore. We are close to Egham now, and may either put up at the "Angler's Rest" or enter the town and seek bed and board at the "Catherine Wheel." Egham is a small town surrounded by some very pretty country, which, having been, bit by bit, blemished by taste, has received the final blow from the conspicuous benevolence of a millionaire. This gentleman has built a gorgeous palace, nay, two gorgeous palaces, for imbeciles of the superior class. The buildings, taken together, may be about as big as Windsor Castle, and they are as visibly prominent in the landscape, though not precisely with the same effect. A white granite bridge, designed by Rennie, and opened in 1832, by William IV. and Queen Adelaide, connects Egham with Staines, and in these iron times is a positive relief to the eye afflicted by such viaducts, railway and other, as are rapidly spoiling the Thames. Altogether there is a comfortable modern look about both places, their comeliness, such as it is, being entirely due to natural surroundings. Egham is mainly one long street. The church is a plain structure of the negative style of 1820, the tower being a landmark seen from far. There is likewise a chapel of ease; and there are places of worship for different denominations. What more of Egham? Strode's almshouses are in its High Street, and a cottage hospital is healthily placed on Egham Hill. The Elizabethan house of Great Fosters is in the neighbourhood. Egham has an annual race-meeting, the course being no other than Runnymede. Staines, new and manufactural as it now appears for the most part--the "linoleum" works having largely contributed to its industrial aspect--is as old as any place in true English history. Ancient records give the name as Stanes. Modernised though it be, Staines is by no means bereft of all antiquity. The church is venerable; and near it is Winicroft House, a Tudor building which some of the good folk, innocent of architecture and chronology, soberly assign to the reign of King John, who sure enough had a palace at Staines, somewhere or other, and not impossibly on this particular site. One of the earliest bridges in England, preceding the Roman, as may be inferred from the Itinerary of Antoninus, crossed the river here. When the Roman road to the west was made, and a military station formed at Staines, it is probable that a stronger bridge was built; and, as most of the Roman bridges in England seem to have been of wood, supported by stone piers, the guess that Staines, or more properly Stanes, took its name from those relics of Roman occupancy, is perhaps pardonable. Just above the town, at the mouth of one of the entrances of the Colne into the Thames, where an ait is formed, stands a monument worth careful attention. It is a square stone shaft on a pedestal, which again is raised on a base formed of three gradations.