"The appointments and the horse-flesh that go to make a first-rate modern turn-out are luxurious beyond anything that 'Nimrod' could have seen, splendid as were some of the crack coaches of his day. Were he here now, he could but acknowledge our superiority in this respect; but we can imagine his critical faculties centred upon what he would have called the 'tooling' of the drag, and his disappointment, not in the workmanship of the driver, but in the excellence of the highways of to-day, which give a coachman no opportunities of showing how resourceful he could be with his wrist, nor how scientific with his 'springing' of his team. Let us compassionate the critic whose well-trained faculties are thus wasted! [Sidenote: _TO DORKING_] "But it is full time we were off. A final flourish of the horn, and away we go, our coach making for the heart of Surrey. 'Southward o'er Surrey's pleasant hills,' as Tom Ingoldsby says, we go, to Leatherhead, beside Drayton's 'mousling Mole'; and so, with a clatter and a cheery rattle of the harness, past Mickleham, with its wayside church, and Juniper Hall, red-faced, green-shuttered; perched above the roadside, redolent of memories of the French refugees,--of whom M. D'Arblay, the husband of Fanny Burney, was one,--and still wearing a fine and most unmistakable eighteenth-century air, even though, as we pass, an equally undoubted nineteenth-century telegraph-boy comes walking, with the leisurely air peculiar to telegraph-boys, out of its carriage-drive into the road. [Illustration: MICKLEHAM CHURCH.] [Illustration: BURFORD BRIDGE.] [Illustration: THE "WHITE HORSE," DORKING.] "Now we are nearing our journey's end. The glorious woodlands of Norbury Park--that old-time resort of literary ladies and gaping gentlemen, who stapped their vitals and protested monstrously that the productions of those blue-stockings were designed for immortality, long before the modern woman was thought possible--the woods of Norbury come in view, and the great swelling side of Box Hill rises in front, with the Burford Bridge Hotel beneath, shaded by lofty trees which take their nourishment from the Mole, bridged here by a substantial brick-and-stone structure that gives that hostelry its name. [Illustration: The Road to Dorking.] [Sidenote: _BURFORD BRIDGE_]