On the Brighton road itself--where the reader must bear in mind that his head has been turned Londonwards--he finds not much of interest till it comes to switchback over Earlswood Common, between an artificial lake and the palace of the idiot asylum. Thus it mounts the sand ridge, stretching towards Reigate in boldly broken scars and tangled hollows of the red sandstone that gives Redhill its name, here crowned by a circular clump to commemorate the Jubilee of 1897. On the other side this range invites a fine diversion, by either low or high roads, past Nutfield and Bletchingley to Godstone, on whose Green can be joined the road going southwards by Caterham. Our business-like highway has now nothing for it but a long down and up through the main street of Redhill, in the central depression passing the big Junction and St. Ann's Schools on the right, where, on the other side, the excrescence of Warwick Town has grown along the cross-road almost into Reigate. When the high-road gets out of Redhill, it is climbing the Downs, reached at Merstham below Gatton Park, and passed by a valley making the course of the Bourne, one of those English _wadys_ so common in chalk countries, which, filled by the overflowing of some subterranean reservoir, may burst out in ravaging floods, as this one has often done. In the same hollow pass is pent up the railway that was apt to be choked by the trains of two lines, till the Brighton Company relieved the pressure by a new conduit from Earlswood to Purley. The road through Croydon falls into Smitham Bottom, brightened for Londoners by such names as Stoat's Nest and Hooley Farm, but overshadowed by the great County Asylum on Cane's Hill, and the buildings that have sprung up about it. By Cane's Hill opens the Chipstead valley, running up to Kingswood and Walton Heath. On the other side rises the smooth swell of the Farthing or Fairdene Downs, which, with Coulsdon Common beyond, are a pleasure-ground of the City of London, as seems too little known to Londoners, unless it be the Guardsmen from Coulsdon Barracks, whose uniforms may appear as showy dots on the turf slopes, where sometimes hardly a human figure comes in sight over a mile of open prospect. Yet few finer rambles can be found so near London than by mounting from Coulsdon station to the bare top of this ridge, and keeping straight along, to hold on by a woodland lane for Chaldon and the brow of the Downs, with more than one rough path dropping off into the hollow on the left to straggle up again to Coulsdon Common and towards Caterham. But our road, as Mrs. Gamp philosophically remarks, being born in a vale, must take the consequences of such a situation. It leads us humbly on to the violent outbreak of new houses about Purley, looked down on by the Reedham [Illustration: FLANCHFORD MILL.]