[Illustration: AN ENGLISH FARMYARD: BURNHAM ABBEY FARM.]
From Clewer the pilgrim of the roads mounts into Windsor by way of grim and grimy slums, and therefore those who would come to Windsor had by far the better do so by water, from which the slums look picturesque. The view of Windsor, indeed, from the windings of the Thames (Windsor is the Saxon “Windlesora,” the winding shore) is one of the half-dozen most supremely grand and beautiful views in England.
Of Windsor, in Berkshire, and Eton, in Bucks, joined by a bridge that here spans the Thames, I here propose to say little or nothing. To treat of them at all would, within the scope of this book, be inadequate, and to deal with them according to their importance would demand a separate volume. Moreover, to write of them with an airy assurance requires not a little expert local knowledge of the kind to be expected only of those who have made them places of long residence or study.
There was once a man who falsely claimed to have been educated at Eton, and was stumped first ball. They asked him if he knew the Cobbler. “Yes,” he said, “I know the old fellow very well.” Is it an unconscious invention of my very own, or did he further proceed to say that he had often helped the old fellow when he was in low water? At any rate, ’twill serve; and will doubtless divert those who know the “old fellow” in question, whom no one could aid under those circumstances, except perhaps the Clerk of the Weather and the lock-keepers above and below, who, between them, might serve him sufficiently well. Not to further mystify readers overseas, who know not Eton, let it at once be said that the “Cobbler” is an island; and that the famous person who claimed to have known him must be placed in association with the pretended traveller who knew the Dardanelles intimately, had dined with them often, and had found them jolly good fellows.
Eton has for centuries been _the_ public school of all others, where the sons of landed and of moneyed men have been educated into the belief that they and theirs stand for England, whereas, if it were not for the great optimistic, cheerfully hard-working middle-class folk, who found businesses, and employ the lower orders on the one hand, while on the other they pay rents to the landowning and governing classes, there would not be any England for them to misgovern, you know.