I do not aspire to emulate this author's stilted gait on the trip from Staines to London, but I invite the reader to plod with me along the tow-path; that, as he is aware, will pass from one side to another, a matter hardly understood by an observant American writer, who made note how "one shore of the Thames, sometimes the right, sometimes the left, it seems, belongs to the public." From the Bells of Ouseley to Staines Bridge the tow-path has been in Surrey; now it crosses to the pleasant river front of the town, the Surrey side being blocked by private paradises and boating-houses. To Chertsey, the next Surrey town, we might, indeed, cut across by a road that at one point comes close to the river; but the more inviting way is the path on the Middlesex bank, and at one of the locks we may have the luck to catch a steamboat plying in summer between Kingston and Oxford on a river, of which that old poet might say more emphatically in our generation:-- Though with those streams, he no resemblance hold, Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold; His genuine and less guilty wealth to explore, Search not his bottom, but survey his shore. The riches of the shore here are chiefly in trim gardens and flat fields, by which the tow-path leads windingly, yet spares us Father Thames' most wayward aberration, the mile-long loop of Penton-Hook, across the mouth of which we cut by the lock in a couple of minutes. Before reaching this from Staines, is passed on the opposite bank a surprising collection of bungalows, shanties, and tents, one of those settlements of genteel gipseying that have grown up on the banks in our time. Beyond the lock, we come to the Middlesex village of Laleham, in whose churchyard lies Matthew Arnold, born here in his father's pre-Rugby days. Below this leafy place, beginning to be overlaid by builders' plans, road and tow-path run together beside Laleham Park towards Chertsey Bridge, the Surrey bank being fringed by willow copses, much sought for floating flirtations and picnic teas. But to reach the older part of Chertsey, one had better cross by the ferry at Laleham, and take a mile of straight hedgerow path over the Abbey Mead, passing a crumbling fragment, all that now represents what was once the richest of Surrey's monasteries, as it was the first founded in the county by St. Augustine.