Surrey is seamed with such immemorial rights of way, some, indeed, lost, stolen, or strayed into more formal roads; but County Councils and the like are now vigilant against private usurpation of their charms. On the edge of the noisy town, and all over the quiet countryside, they may be found and followed, sometimes for miles, every kind of them, straight field-cuts, blooming hedgerow paths, hard-beaten tow-paths, green ridges, leafy archways, trim woodland avenues "for whispering lovers made," free passages over lordly demesnes, straggling tracks across rough heaths, half-choked smugglers' lanes, and old historic roads, here improved into a busy turnpike, there run wild as a grassy sward or shrunk to a doubtful footway, all open to lovers of virtue, who are quiet, and go _a-walking_, as a modern Izaak Walton might choose, now that the waters of the Mole and the Wandle are strictly preserved. Let other-minded excursionists stay in Middlesex. II THE RIVERSIDE Surrey's crooked northern border is washed by the Thames, "great father of the British floods," to whom so many compliments, vows, and addresses have been offered in prose and verse:-- O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full! These lines, in which let no writer scorn to join chorus of quotation, are from Denham's _Cooper's Hill_, a title supplied by the "airy mountain" that raises its "proud head"--to a poetic height of 200 feet and more--upon the north-western corner of Surrey. Descending the river from Windsor, after passing Old Windsor Church, we enter this county beyond the "Bells of Ouseley," to find the right bank edged by what plain prose must belittle as a wooded rise, on whose top, pleasant rather than proud, stands a stately mansion that, in the course of its chequered history, grew into a banyan grove of buildings built in vain. Cooper's Hill was in Victorian times the property of one of those meteoric financiers flashing across the sky of British commerce, the same who in London built for himself a house so large that no one ever lived in it. Then the place made itself a new name as a college for the Indian engineering service; but this institution came to be uprooted, and its halls passed into private occupation, after for a time standing desolate, as those of Ossian's Balclutha, while there was question what to do with them. An academy for horse-marines, a week-end club for members of Parliament, a training-school for county councillors, are suggestions that could be made; but, to my mind, a truly Liberal Government might have endowed Cooper's Hill as an asylum for minor poets.