never smiled again, and his sad, tender face in Vandyke's noble picture looks down on me from the wall as I write and bears out the truth of the story. Often and often when we children were playing in the park did we wander about, trying to settle from which tree the arrow glanced, conjuring up before our eyes the whole scene—the king's anger and the archbishop's despair at the catastrophe—and feeling the while a proud personal interest in it all. Ah, what good days those were, roaming about knee-deep in heather, catching the rare moths, chasing the squirrels that whisked up the fir stems and mocked us from their high perch, searching the hollow trees for woodpeckers' nests, eating the beech-nuts or pricking our fingers as we tried to open the husks of the Spanish chestnuts that grew by the lake! From among the bulrushes the coots sailed out at our approach, and the tiny dabchick dived so deep that we thought, "This time she must be drowned," when, lo and behold! she would appear twenty yards off, a little black ball with a yellow bill, only to take breath and plunge again. Sometimes in a hard winter we would hear high in the sky the cry of a weird pack of hounds. Nearer and nearer drew that unearthly music, till we held our breath in a kind of delightful terror, and then above our heads appeared a flock of wild swans on the search for water; and down they dropped, like white cannon-balls, into the lake, sending a mass of spray into the air and shivering the smooth black surface of the water into a thousand ripples that circled away and lapped against the banks in mimic waves.
But I think my most exquisite moment of happiness was one spring day when I saw close by me a little fox-cub—a furry darling, about as big as a four-months'-old kitten, with black stripes across his fat back. He had ventured out of the fox-earths on the other side of the park palings, and did not know how to get back to his anxious mother. I tried to catch him, but that was not to be, and young Reineke soon found a way home. Nevertheless, the joy was mine, never to be forgotten, of having seen a real wild beast so near.
Even on dark and stormy days the park has its own strange charm as one walks up the gloomy avenue on the soft fir-needles glistening with rain. A murmur fills the air as of sea-waves beating on the shore: it is the wet south-west wind soughing overhead and lashing the writhing branches. One thinks of the German fairy-tales, and half expects to meet the old woman who led Hansel and Grethel captive, or to come suddenly upon her house with its ginger-bread roof and barley-sugar windows.
I remember once taking a well-known musician through those fir woods one dark afternoon as the wind was making soft music above us. He was silent, and I was disappointed, for I had fancied that the new country would delight him and excite his imagination. But when we reached home he sat down to the piano in the dark, and played on and on as if he were pouring out his whole soul in the flood of sweet melody; and when, after an hour of marvellous improvisation, he stopped and said to us, "I couldn't help it: I had to reel off all that I have been seeing and hearing this afternoon," then I was content, for I knew nothing had been thrown away on our friend, and that if he could not talk about it all he could do even better.
But if you would see Bramshill in all its pride come on some November morning to the first meet of the season.
Well do I recollect the excitement of those happy days. How long the night seemed before morning broke and I was sure it was not pouring with rain! How pleasant to run down to breakfast all neat and trim in one's habit! And then when flask and sandwiches were safely bestowed, white gloves buttoned and hat firmly secured, how eagerly I watched for half-past ten to walk out to the stables, where the horses were stamping and snorting impatiently, knowing full well by their marvellous instinct what enjoyment was before them! Then my little bay Sintram came dancing out, followed by Puff, the dear old brown mare. I was tossed into the saddle, and away we went at that peculiarly unpleasant and tiring pace, a "cover trot," which for some inscrutable reason is the right thing if you are going to a meet. Less than a trot, more than a walk, you can neither sit still nor rise in your stirrup, but must just jog along till you fairly ache. The horses pull and fight with their bits as we keep them in the soft sandy ditch up the lane to spare their precious feet. At the few cottages we pass women and children are all standing at their garden-gates to watch the "quality" go by. The ploughmen in the fields discover that the furrows nearest the road need a great deal of attention; the shepherds fold their sheep to-day close to the hedge, so as to secure front places for the show; and if we chance to run this way every man will leave his work and follow us as long as his breath lasts, and his master, who is riding, will not grumble, for if hounds are running every man, be he rich or poor, has a right to run too.
Up the sandy hill we go, and out on the wide moors, covered with soft brown heather, which stretch away with hardly a break twenty miles south and east to Aldershot Camp or Windsor Forest. On the brow of the hill grows a mighty bush of furze which always goes by the name of "Miss Bremer's furze-bush." When the dainty Swedish novelist once came to gladden Eversley Rectory with her presence she told how she longed to see the plant before which Linnæus had fallen on his knees; and she walked up this selfsame hill and with eyes full of tears gazed on the prickly shrub with its mist of golden-colored, apricot-scented flowers. The old Hampshire proverb says, "When furze is out of flower kissing is out of fashion;" and, sure enough, there is not a month in the year in which you may not find a blossom or two among the green spines.
Now we cross a green road, the Welsh Ride, which in the autumn is covered with thousands of cattle making their way in great herds from the Welsh mountains and Devonshire pastures to the winter fairs round London. The drovers used to boast that they could bring their beasts all the way from Wales without once going off turf or through a turnpike. Now, alas! crowded cattle-trucks on the railway are fast superseding the old-fashioned, wholesome way of travelling, and we seldom have the autumnal air filled with the lowing of the herds, the barking of the attendant dogs and the shouts of the drovers on their sturdy Welsh ponies. But to-day the Welsh Ride looks gay enough, for it is dotted with little knots of horsemen in black or red coats using it as a short cut from Aldershot and Sandhurst. We turn off the moor into the shadow of the fir avenue that leads half a mile up to the park-gates. The ground, covered with a soft carpet of pine-needles and burrowed everywhere by the roots of the trees, gives off a hollow echo to the horses' clattering hoofs. The sombre avenue is alive in unwonted fashion to-day. Now we pass a group of pedestrians from the village; now a young farmer comes by on a half-broken colt which is to make its first acquaintance with the hounds; then a break with a big party from a country-house in Miss Mitford's village passes us with a gay greeting as it rattles on. A tiny nutshell of a pony-carriage full of babies comes trotting along, and its driver, poor Sheldon Williams, will make notes of the scene and put them into one of his clever hunting-pictures, little dreaming of the day when his early death will leave those babies penniless. Now a group of the redcoats we saw on the Welsh Ride overtakes us, and Sintram plunges and dances as a wild little thorough-bred comes up to our side. His master, who has already gained his Victoria Cross twice—first as a little lad in the trenches at Sevastopol, and again for desperate deeds of valor in the Indian mutiny—is to win yet further glory in 1879 at the head of the "flying column" in Zululand—Evelyn Wood, the most gallant and humane of all that gallant band.
The white park-gate is held wide open by a poor ne'er-do-weel in a shabby old red coat—John Ellis by name. How he gets his living no one knows, but if there is a meet of fox-hounds anywhere within ten miles, there he is sure to be, holding people's horses or ready at a gate for stray pennies and sixpences. There is usually such a hanger-on to every pack of hounds in England—one who travels immense distances on foot to turn up in unexpected places and get a few hard-earned shillings as his reward. We jog along under the magnificent silver firs, only to be equalled by those in the duke of Wellington's park at Strathfieldsaye, hard by; then up the lime avenue which borders the cricket-ground, where thirty years ago the most famous matches in Hampshire were played; and as we reach the iron gates leading up to the house our little knot of riders has swelled into a veritable cavalcade.
Down the drive we trot, past the stables, where the watch-dogs strain angrily at their chains and a little green monkey jibbers with rage and excitement, and in another moment we turn under the shadow of the great house up to the western door. Here all is life and bustle. Twenty or thirty carriages are drawn up by the widespreading lawn: grooms are holding horses ready for their masters,
