The really most sentimentally interesting thing here is something that might well be overlooked by ninety-nine of every hundred whose curiosity prompts them to enter the churchyard; and it _is_ probably so overlooked. This is the not at all striking tomb of one Edward Rose, citizen of London, who died in 1653, and lies buried in the churchyard, against the south wall of the church, by the great yew tree. He left £20 for the purchase of an acre of land, from the rent of which he ordained that his grave should be maintained in decent order, and bequeathed “£5 for making a frame or partition of wood” where he had appointed his burying-place; and further ordered three rose-trees, or more, to be planted there. The bequests were to the minister, churchwardens, and overseers for the time being, so long as they should cause the wooden partition to be kept in repair and the rose-trees preserved or others planted in their places from time to time, as they should decay. Thus it is that, duly honouring his sentimental fancy, rose-trees are to this day to be seen here, enclosed within a low wooden railing. CHAPTER XII PUTNEY—FULHAM BRIDGE—FULHAM The way from Barnes into Putney is now, when once you have passed the Common, wholly cut up into a suburb of streets originally mean, and at last, by contact with the stern squalors of life in a striving quarter of London town, become little removed above the level of slums. But Barnes Common remains something considerable in the way of an asset, and through it still runs the Beverley Brook along the last mile or two of its nine-miles course from Cheam to its outlet into the Thames at Barnes Elms. I should say it would be a sorry business attempting to fish nowadays in the Beverley Brook; but regrets on that score are the sheerest futilities, and it should rather be a matter for congratulation that the brook has not been piped, and so altogether hidden from the eye of day. One, to be sure, regrets many things within this sphere of change; notably the very considerable slices the London and South-Western Railway has been allowed to appropriate from the very middle of the Common, not only for the purpose of running the line through it, which, it might possibly be argued, was a geographical necessity, but also for the building of its Barnes station there, which was nothing less than a sublime piece of impudence. What is left of Barnes Common is particularly beautiful in the way of towsled gorse and some pretty clumps of silver-birches. On a byroad leading off it into Putney—a route called Mill Hill road—is something very much in the nature of a surprise in these parts, nothing less than an old toll-house; a queer little building picturesquely overhung by bushy poplars. Its unexpected presence here (it must be now the nearest survival of its kind to London) hints that the days when Putney was really a village are not, after all, so long gone by.