To turn to a more congenial subject. Most Londoners who are fond of the country know that just where the great chalk rampart ten miles south of London dips down into the clay basin in which the city stands, there bursts up a series of springs. They are most frequent between Croydon on the east and Ewell on the west, and the wanderer in those regions at night, when everything is quiet, hears the sound of waters continually. The chalk downs are a great natural reservoir for the rain, which sinks down until it reaches the level of the clay, and then it breaks out. Nothing can be more beautiful than these natural fountains. There is one by the dusky high road at Ewell which is really a miracle of purity, and the ordinary human being, ungifted with poetic gifts powers of expression, looking down into it, feels that he has no words which will fit and that it is transcendent, like a mountain, music, or the sea. The symbolism of the thing is infinite. Coming from such a depth, its temperature does not vary like that of surface waters. It does not freeze in winter, and is cold in summer. Coming from such a depth, too, it never fails.

In Carshalton, about midway between Ewell and Croydon, a number of springs unite, which spread out into lovely ponds, and form the head waters of the river Wandle. Mr Ruskin noticed them in one of his books, and tried to rouse the people who lived round about to do something to keep them in order. And in truth, at the time he wrote, their condition was deplorable. They were used as cesspools; and the living immaculate stream, almost at the very moment of its birth, was contaminated and fouled with unnameable filth. It was absolute suffering to a sensitive person to see it so treated; it was like the ruin of childhood. Happily the sewage has now been diverted; but one of the ponds remaining in a very neglected state, Mr Ruskin has determined to restore it at his own expense. It has been lined with flints, paved with seashore pebbles, fenced from the intrusion of cattle; at once protected and developed. It is not yet finished, but when it is complete it will be a worthy and characteristic monument to Mr Ruskin's memorial.