That famous promenade afterwards known as the Pantiles was first made in 1638, when the sloping side of a meadow was levelled and embanked to afford a recreative walk for those who took the waters. Two buildings only stood on the spot, the Ladies’ and the Gentlemen’s Coffee-houses. Things remained very much the same through the long years of the Commonwealth. The “wells” were not deserted, for there were ailing bodies even among the elect; but the coffee-houses were not so gay, and the religious cast that came over the scene was reflected in the names then first given to the encircling hills. The Puritans named them after some fancied resemblance to Jerusalem, and thus Mount Ephraim and Mount Sion were christened, and the neighbouring Calverley is in like manner supposed to derive from “Calvary.” With the Restoration “the happy springs of Tonbridge” began to grow merry again, and the card-playing, the dicing, the dancing that were all ended under Puritan rule grew again furious. There was still no town, and the men and women of fashion who did not choose to lodge at Tonbridge had to find rustic accommodation in the cottages of Speldhurst. Presently wooden huts on wheels appeared on the common, and were moved from place to place, as the fancy of the fashionables, playing at rustics, dictated. To add to the Arcadian delights of that most primitive and pleasant period in the existence of Tunbridge Wells, a daily fair went forward at the spring-head. Rosy-cheeked farmers’ daughters brought chickens, cherries, and cream and sold them with great profit to town gallants, much too taken with the unspoiled graces of those rustic beauties to be able to drive bargains; and soon a bazaar became established under the trees, where milliners designed “rustic” dresses at town prices for ruralising London fair ladies. You might lose or win a fortune at basset under those innocent trees, and wind up the summer evening with open-air dances on the green. It was the “open-air life,” if not the simple one, that then prevailed, and for at least a century that was the especial note of Tunbridge Wells. Evelyn describes it as “a very sweet place, private and refreshing,” but that privacy may be questioned, for when houses were so few it was impossible to be other than public, and at a later period, when the town came into existence around the spring, it was especially ordained by the autocratic Nash that “every visitor should live in public.” [Illustration: CHURCH OF KING CHARLES THE MARTYR.] One of the earliest evidences of the permanence of this settlement was the building of a chapel, in 1684. This is the existing church, dedicated by the then ascendant Royalists to “King Charles the Martyr.” It and the Pantiles—and of course the Common—are the only vestiges of the Tunbridge Wells of that time.