There could have been no more certain method of inviting the most odious of comparisons than that of naming Redhill after the fine old feudal town of Warwick, which first arose beneath the protecting walls of its ancient castle. Either town has an origin typical of its era, and both _look_ their history and circumstances. Redhill, within the memory of those still living, sprang up around a railway platform, and the only object that may be said to frown in it is the great gas-holder, built on absolutely the most prominent and desirable site in the whole town; and that not only frowns, but stinks as well, and is therefore not a desirable substitute for a castle keep. Here, at any rate, "Mrs. Partington's" remark that "comparisons is odorous" would be altogether in order. Prominent above all other buildings in the town, in the backward view from that godfatherly hill, is the huge St. Anne's Asylum, housing between four and five hundred children of the poor. "The Cutting" through the brow of the hill, enclosed on either side by high brick walls, leads presently upon Redhill and Earlswood Commons, where movement is unrestrained and free as air, and the vision is bounded only by Leith Hill in one direction and the blue haze of distance in another. It is Holmesdale--the vale of holms, or oak woods--upon which you gaze from here; that Vale of Holmesdall Never wonne, ne never shall, as the braggart old couplet has it, in allusion to the defeat and slaughter of the invading Danes at Ockley A.D. 851. In one of its periodic funks, the War Office, terrified for the safety of London more than for that of Holmesdale, purchased land on this hill-top for the erection of a fort, and--in a burst of confidence--sold it again. The time is probably near when the War Office, like another "Sister Anne," will "see somebody coming," when this or another site will be re-purchased at a much enhanced, or scare, price. [Sidenote: EARLSWOOD] Earlswood Common is a welcome change after Redhill. It gives sensations of elbow-room, of freedom and vastness, not so much from its own size as from the expanse of that view across the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. The road across Earlswood Common is an almost perfect "switchback," as the cyclist who is not met with a southerly wind will discover. You can see it from this view-point, going undulating away until in the dim woody perspective it seems to end in some tangled and trackless forest, so densely grown do the trees look from this distance. It was here, at a wayside inn, that the present historian fell in with a Sussex peasant of the ancient and vanishing kind.