In 1638 Milton left Horton, accompanied by a man-servant, for a long term of continental travel, and Horton ceased to be further associated with him. It would be vain to seek, nowadays, for the Milton home here, for the house at Horton, where his parents and himself and his younger brother Christopher lived, was demolished in 1798. The town of Staines, supposed to be the site of the Roman station of _Ad Pontes_, and to derive its present name from its position on the Roman road to the west—that is to say on the stones, or the stone-paved road—stands at the meeting of Middlesex and Bucks. It is also the western limit of the Metropolitan Police District, and a stone standing in a riverside meadow above the bridge, known as “London Stone,” properly and officially “the City Stone,” until modern times marked the limits of the City of London’s river jurisdiction. Staines was also a place of importance in the coaching age, for it stood upon the greatly travelled Exeter road. To-day it is, in spite of those varied claims to notice, an uninteresting place. The neighbourhood of Staines is one of many waters. They divide Middlesex and Bucks in the many branches and confluent channels of the Colne, and they permeate those widespreading levels westward of what was once Hounslow Heath known broadly as Staines Moor. This watery landscape, now so beautiful, was once, doubtless, a very dreary waste. All moors and heaths carry with them, in their very name, the stigma of dreariness, just as when Goldsmith wrote. The name of a heath could only be associated with footpads and highwaymen, and to style a scene in a play “Crackskull Common” seemed a natural and appropriate touch. This ill association of commons long ago became a thing of the past, but we still couple the title of a “moor” with undesirable places, generally of an extreme sterility and associated in the mind’s eye with inclement weather of the worst type. The sun never shines on moors, except perhaps so fiercely as to shrivel you up. On moors no winds blow but tempests, probably from the north or east, and the only rains known there are cold deluges. A moor is, in short, by force of a time-honoured tradition not yet quite outworn, a place good to keep away from; or, being by ill-luck upon it, to be left behind at the earliest possible moment.