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To continue on the highroad that leads out of populous Richmond toward the “Star and Garter,” is to find one’s self presently surrounded with rustic sights and sounds altogether unexpected of the stranger in these gates. To take the lower road is to come directly into Petersham, wearing, even in these days, an air of retirement and a smack of the eighteenth century, despite its close neighbourhood to the Richmond of District Railways and suburban aspects.

The little church of Petersham is interesting despite (perhaps on account of) its bastard architecture and singular plan, but the feature that gives distinction is its cupola-covered bell turret, quaintly designed and louvre-boarded. The interior is small and cramped, and crowded with monuments. Among these the most interesting, so it seemed to us, was that to the memory of Captain George Vancouver, whose name is perpetuated in the christening of Vancouver Island.

Others of some note, very great personages in their day, but now half-forgotten, are buried in the churchyard and have weighty monuments within the church. Among these are an Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, a vice-admiral, a serjeant-at-law, Lauderdales, Tollemaches, and several dames and knights of high degree. Perhaps more interesting still, Mortimer Collins, author of, among other novels, that charming story, “Sweet and Twenty,” lies buried here.

And from here it is well within three miles to the little village of Ham, encircling, with its scattered cottages and mansions of stolid red brick of legitimate “Queen Anne” design, that common whose name has within the last two years been so familiar in the mouths of men. You may journey into the county’s depths and not find so quiet a spot as this out-of-the-world corner, nor one so altogether behind these bustling times. It has all the makings of the familiar type of an old English village, even to its princely manor-house. Ham House is magnificent indeed, and thereby hangs a tale.

Its occupiers have been for many generations the Earls of Dysart, whose family rose to noble rank by sufficiently curious means in the time of Charles I., an era when the peerage was reinforced by methods essentially romantic and irregular. Beauty (none too strictly strait-laced) secured titles for its bar-sinistered descendants in those times: in our own it is commonly Beer that performs the same kindly office.

New Inn, Ham

The first Earl of Dysart had in his time fulfilled the painful post of “whipping-boy”—a species of human scapegoat—to his sacred Majesty, and by his stripes was his preferment earned.

I am told that it is not to be supposed this house and manor are the property of the Dysarts: they pay and have paid, time almost out of mind, an annual rent into the Court of Chancery for the benefit of the lost owners.

“But yet,” said my informant at Ham—the strenuous upholder of public rights in that notorious Ham Common prosecution—“but yet, although this is their only local status, the Dysart Trustees have endeavoured, from time to time, to assume greater rights over Ham Common and public rights-of-way, than even might be claimed by the veritable lord of the manor.”

In the early part of 1891, the Trustees placed notice-boards at different points of the Common, setting forth the pains and penalties and nameless punishments that would be incurred by any who should cut turf or cart gravel, exceeding in this act (it seems) their rights, even had they possessed the title, for there is extant a deed executed by Charles I., in favour of the people of Ham, giving the Common to their use for ever.

Fortunately there was sufficient public spirit in Ham for the resisting of illegal encroachments, and eventually the notice-boards were sawn down by village Hampdens. Thereupon followed a prosecution at the instance of the Dysart Trustees, with the result that the defendants were all triumphantly acquitted.

It were indeed a pity had this, one of the largest and most beautiful commons near London, been gradually drawn within the control of family trustees. It is now a breezy open space of some seventy-eight acres, stretching away from Richmond Park to near Teddington, and pleasingly wild with gorse and sandpits and ancient elms.

Here, almost to where the Kingston road bisects the Common, the avenue leading to Ham House stretches its aisle of greenery, its length nearly half-a-mile. To pursue this walk to the wrought-iron gates of the House is to be assured of interest. Erected in the early years of the seventeenth century, it remains a splendid specimen of building ere yet the day of contracts had set in. The red-brick front faces toward the river, and includes a spacious courtyard in whose centre is placed a semi-recumbent stone figure of Thames with flowing urn. Along the whole extensive frontage of the House, placed in niches, runs a series of busts, cast in lead and painted to resemble stone—a quaint conceit.

But it is not only the splendour of design and execution that renders Ham House so interesting. It was, in the time of Charles II., a meeting-place of the notorious Cabal—that quintette of unscrupulous Ministers of State whose doings were a shame to their country. Here they plotted together, and under this roof the liberties of the lieges were schemed away. Those were stirring times at Ham. Now the place wears almost a deserted look. The courtyard is grass-grown between the joints of its paving, and it is many years since the massive iron gates enclosing the grounds were used. It seems to have been lonely and decayed, even in Horace Walpole’s time. He says, “Every minute I expected to see ghosts sweeping by—ghosts that I would not give sixpence to see—Lauderdales, Tollemaches, and Maitlands.” For my part I think I would give a great many sixpences not to see them, either by night or by day, whether or not they carried their heads in the place where heads should be, or under their arms, an exceedingly uncomfortable position, even for ghosts, one would think. I have not that horrid itching (which I suppose characterises the membership of the Psychical Research Society) for the society of wraiths and bogeys, and hold ghosts, apparitions, spooks, and spunkies of every kind in a holy horror.

HAM HOUSE.

Therefore, we presently departed hence, and came, in course of time, to Kingston. Whether or not Kingston can be identified as the place where Cæsar crossed the ford across the Thames in pursuit of Cassivelaunus and his cerulean-dyed hordes of Britons, our ancestors, is, I take it, of not much concern nowadays, although antiquaries of our fathers’ time made a great pother about the conflicting claims of Kingston and Coway Stakes, at Shepperton, to the honour, if honour it be, of affording passage to the victorious general and his legions. I like something of more human interest than these dry bones, and, I doubt not, you who endeavour to read these pages are of the same mind; so, to make your pilgrimage through this book the lighter, I think “we had better” do like Boffin, in the presence of Mrs. Boffin—that is, “drop the subject.”

But the subject to which we must come (for no one who writes upon Kingston can avoid it) is only one remove nearer. I refer to that bone of contention (excuse the confusion of ideas) the King’s Stone, now set up and railed round in Kingston market-place, and carven with the names of the seven Saxon kings crowned here. It is this stone which has caused many pretty controversies as to whether or not it confers the name upon the town, or whether or not the place was the King’s Town.

You may, doubtless, if you are greedy of information on these heads, find all conceivable arguments set forth in the pages of the Surrey Archæological Society’s Transactions. I confess my curiosity does not carry me to such lengths. The stone is there, and, like good tourists, we accepted as so much gospel the facts set forth on it, and cared nothing as to the etymology of Kingston. Instead, we busied ourselves in hiring a boat which should take us to Reading, a journey which we estimated of a week’s duration.

BELOW KINGSTON.

Geographers, physical and political, tell us that Thames drains and waters all that great district which lies between the estuary of the Severn and the seaward sides of Essex and Kent; that it is the fertiliser of square miles innumerable, and the potent source of London’s pre-eminent rank amongst the cities of the earth. This is all very true, but the geographers take no note of Thames’ other functions; the inspiration of the poets and the painters, the enrichment of innkeepers and boat-proprietors, and the pleasuring of all them that delight in bathing and the rowing of boats. Everywhere in summer-time are boats and launches and canoes, punts and houseboats, and varieties innumerable of floating things; for when the sun shines, and the incomparable river scenery of the Thames is at its best, the heart of man desireth nothing more ardently than to lie in a boat upon the quiet mirrored depths of a shady backwater, or better still, to sit within the roaring of the weir, where the swell of the tumbling water acts like a tonic upon the spirits, and the sunlight fashions rainbows in the smoke-like suspended moisture of its foam. These are modern pleasures. For centuries the Thames has flowed through a well-peopled country, yet the delights of the river are new-found, and only in the eighteenth century did the poets’ chorus break forth in flood of praise. But to-day every one who can string rhymes makes metrical essays upon the Thames, and writers without number have written countless books upon it. From Kingston to Oxford, houseboats make populous all its banks, and the quantity of paint and acres of canvas that have been expended upon artistic efforts along its course, from Trewsbury Mead to the Nore, must ever remain without computation.

For these reasons ’tis better to say little of our journey this afternoon to Shepperton, past Hampton Court, the Cockney’s paradise, to Hampton, Sunbury, Walton, and Halliford. The river was crowded with boating parties, with those who raced and with others who paddled lazily, and when night was come the houseboats hung out their paper lanterns, all red and yellow, that streaked every little ripple with waving colour.

That night saw the first unpacking of our knapsacks, and the irrevocable disappearance of their orderly arrangement. Chaos reigned ever afterward within their ostensibly waterproof sides, for to man is not given the gift of packing up, and we were not superior to the generality of our sex. I remember perfectly the shower of things that always befell o’ nights when I came to the ordeal of unpacking my knapsack: how razors, comb and brush, pencils, and neckties and other articles dropped from it; and, I make no doubt, it was the same with the other man.