At the opening of his chronicle, the narrator's supposed stand-point is Maybury Hill, looking down on the Woking railway line, which might be taken as an eastern boundary for the district now in view, if the commons did not straggle over the line to the edge of the Wey valley. Here lies,
[Illustration: AN OLD FARM, NEAR LEITH HILL.]
about Woking Junction, a town that has grown up fast in one generation to attract some score thousand people scattered roomily over a parish whose centre of gravity became shifted by the railway. Among its public buildings is one notable for singularity among Surrey pine-woods, a Mohammedan mosque at the south end of a row of brick buildings beside the down line of the railway as it approaches Woking station. This exotic institution was planted by the late Dr. Leitner as a college for Oriental students of different creeds; and at the other end the mosque had or was to have had its _juwab_ in a temple for Hindoo devotions; but since the death of its eclectically pious founder, the enterprise seems to have come to nought.
The amplest stretch of what is called Chobham Common lies some miles away, upon the Berkshire edge. The best way of reaching this from London is to get out at the border station of Sunningdale; then at once one can mount to the common, on this side subdued by its inevitable destiny to be cut up with lines of houses and swept by a fire of golf balls. Due south one has still a fine open walk by sandy tracks and among ragged thickets, making what our fathers called a dreary waste; then come the wooded ridges and peopled hollows of Windlesham, one of Surrey's most pleasant nooks, that, fortunately for its peacefulness, is not too near a railway station. There is one at Bagshot, to which a path leads over the valley of the Windle, striking into the high-road from Egham beside Bagshot Park, a hunting lodge of former kings, now the seat of H. R. H. the Duke of Connaught. Bagshot, a noted coach station, twenty-six miles from London, that fell into some decay when railways overshadowed roads, has been reviving again in our time. Its chief fame is the nursery gardens of a well-known firm, with its huge holly hedges, the most imposing of which may be sought out above the Church.
