Twenty years ago, Hindhead had a loose scattering of villas and cottages round the Royal Huts Inn at the cross-roads, its post-office being at Grayshott over the Hants border, which was the only thing like a village. Now mansions and bungalows are more or less thickly strung upon those old roads, and on new ones, with shops appearing here and there in what before long may be spoken of as streets. The "Huts," improved into an hotel, has half a dozen rivals, from the mansion-like "Beacon" to the "Fox and Pelican" model public-house; and Glen Lea, oldest of Hindhead _pensions_, sees fresh competitors springing up every year. Houses are dear and lodgings hard to find in the fine season. As in the case of Davos and other health resorts whose merit lay in their untainted air, the place has been overbuilt from the curative point of view; and it begins to attract a gayer society than the early Crusoes of this bracing heath, on which such notable persons have staved off their latter end; while the works of so many writers show how they have been at least sojourners hereabouts.
Mrs. Humphry Ward at one time lived near Haslemere; and any one familiar with its environs can take a good guess at the locality of Robert Elsmere's Surrey parish, into which its squire's stately mansion may have been transposed from Loseley or Sutton. Mrs. Oliphant must have been here, since _The Cuckoo in the Nest_, one of the best of her later novels, evidently deals with the neighbourhood, making a curious medley of real and fictitious names, and hardly doing justice to the scenery. An account of Hindhead a century ago is presented in an older novel called the _King's Mail_. Then Mr. Baring-Gould's _Broom Squire_ opens with that grimly authentic romance Hindhead has of its own, the murder of a luckless sailor, commemorated by a stone at which Dickens makes Nicholas Nickleby sit down to rest on his weary tramp along the Portsmouth Road. A tomb in Thursley churchyard shows a rudely-carved representation of the crime, with this inscription--
A generous but unfortunate Sailor, Who was barbarously murdered on Hindhead, On Sept. 24th 1786,
After he had liberally treated them, and promised them his further assistance on the road to Portsmouth.