160 DOWN. [ch. viii. 



often heard him speak of the wearisome drives of ten miles 

 to or from Croydon or Sydenham the nearest stations 

 with an old gardener acting as coachman, who drove with 

 great caution and slowness up and down the many hills. In 

 later years, regular scientific intercourse with London be- 

 came, as before mentioned, an impossibility. 



The choice of Down was rather the result of despair than 

 of actual preference : my father and mother were weary of 

 house-hunting, and the attractive points about the place 

 thus seemed to them to counterbalance its somewhat more 

 obvious faults. It had at least one desideratum, namely, 

 quietness. Indeed it would have been difficult to find a 

 more retired place so near to London. In 1842 a coach 

 drive of some twenty miles was the usual means of access to 

 Down ; and even now that railways have crept closer to it, 

 it is singularly out of the world, with nothing to suggest 

 the neighbourhood of London, unless it be the dull haze of 

 smoke that sometimes clouds the sky. The village stands 

 in an angle between two of the larger high-roads of the 

 country, one leading to Tunbridge and the other to Wester- 

 ham and Edenbridge. It is cut off from the Weald by a 

 line of steep chalk hills on the south, and an abrupt hill, 

 now smoothed down by a cutting and embankment, must 

 formerly have been something of a barrier against enroach- 

 ments from the side of London. In such a situation, a vil- 

 lage, communicating with the main lines of traffic, only by 

 stony tortuous lanes, may well have preserved its retired 

 character. Nor is it hard to believe in the smugglers and 

 their strings of pack-horses making their way up from the 

 lawless old villages of the Weald, of which the memory still 

 existed when my father settled in Down. The village stands 

 on solitary upland country, 500 to 600 feet above the sea a 

 country with little natural beauty, but possessing a certain 

 charm in the shaws, or straggling strips of wood, capping 

 the chalky banks and looking down upon the quiet ploughed 

 lands of the valleys. The village, of three or four hundred 

 inhabitants, consists of three small streets of cottages, meet- 

 ing in front of the little flint-built church. It is a place 

 where new-comers are seldom seen, and the names occurring 

 far back in the old church registers are still known in the 

 village. The smock-frock is not yet quite extinct, though 

 chiefly used as a ceremonial dress by the " bearers " at 

 funerals ; but as a boy I remember the purple or green 

 smocks of the men at church. 



