Across the bridge here opens the gate of another park, in which are enclosed the remains of Waverley Abbey, the finest ecclesiastical ruins in Surrey, not very rich in such treasures. This was the first Cistercian monastery in England, whose scanty remains stand tangled in greenery, a beautiful sight, and still substantial enough to indicate its fallen grandeur. Recent excavations by the Surrey Archæological Society have been well rewarded. The eighteenth-century mansion kept the old monks' garden, in which Cobbett worked as a boy, and got his fill of fruit, for, he says, the produce could never have been consumed unless the servants lent a mouth. A visitor to the neighbourhood was Sir Walter Scott, who carried away the name of Waverley as a fruitful seed. His famous novel has nothing of the Abbey save its name; but _Sir Nigel_, a lively work of one of our generation's romancers, Sir A. Conan Doyle, has brought this skeleton of a great religious house to life for us as it was in Plantagenet days. In the centre lay the broad Abbey buildings, with church and cloisters, hospitium, chapter-house and fraterhouse, all buzzing with a busy life. Through the open window came the low hum of the voices of the brethren as they walked in pious converse in the ambulatory below. From across the cloisters there rolled the distant rise and fall of a Gregorian chaunt, where the precentor was hard at work upon the choir; while down in the chapter-house sounded the strident voice of Brother Peter, expounding the rule of St. Bernard to the novices. Abbot John rose to stretch his cramped limbs. He looked out at the green sward of the cloisters and at the graceful line of open Gothic arches which skirted a covered walk for the brethren within. Two and two, in their black and white garb, with slow step and heads inclined, they paced round and round. Several of the more studious had brought their illuminating work from the scriptorium and sat in the warm sunshine, with their little platters of pigments and packets of gold-leaf before them, their shoulders rounded and their faces sunk low over the white sheets of vellum. There, too, was the copper-worker, with his burin and graver. Learning and art were not traditions with the Cistercians as with the parent Order of the Benedictines, and yet the library of Waverley was well filled both with precious books and with pious students. But the true glory of the Cistercian lay in his outdoor work; and so ever and anon there passed through the cloister some sunburned monk, soiled mattock or shovel in hand, with his gown looped to his knee, fresh from the fields or the garden. The lush green water-meadows speckled with the heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of cornland reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards on the southern slope of Crooksbury