40

wall of thorns six feet through and fifteen feet high
—that only the finest, heaviest horses can face.
Then what splendid homes there are — great parks
whose owners have been settléd there for hundreds
of years, each with its separate bit of history that
has helped in the making of
England. And chief among
them all is Althorp. Come
with me and let me tell you
of my first walk from Bring-
ton to Althorp Park, where
John Washington was so often
a welcome guest; and let me
show you the very same trees
that he may have climbed
birds’-nesting with young Wil-
liam Spencer, his contempo-
rary and playfellow; and let
us walk through the same
glades where Philip Curtis,
another of the Althorp guests,
may have wandered with fair
Mistress Amy Washington,
John’s sister, whom he mar-
ried in 1620, a year or two
after the marriage of his sis-
ter Mary to John Washing-
ton.

Outside the rectory garden
gates the sun was casting long shadows across the
‘Gravel Walk,” a noble avenue of elms, sadly shat-
tered by the October hurricane of the year before:
but still grand enough to satisfy any one who had not
known their former glory. Far away to the left
across the Valley, Holmby* House of famous
memory, gleamed golden-white on a ridge on in-
tense purple. Everything was bathed in tender
brilliant sunshine, and the air was fresh, clear,
and invigorating, as we neared the high park wall
of olive-green sandstone. A little postern gate
let us into the park, and turning to the left along
the avenue of gigantic elms which runs the whole
way round it inside the wall, we soon reached the
heronry, cut off from the park by tall iron deer-
fencing.

The scene was strangely familiar to me.— Surely

 

* Now spelt Holdenby. It was: here that King Charles the First was
kept ina kind of honourable confinement in 1647, by the Parliamentary
Commissioners.

IN SIR JOHN WASHINGTON’S DAY.— CAVALIERS AND ROUNDHEADS.

THE WASHINGTONS’ ENGLISH HOME,

I must have seen it all before— But no! that was
impossible as I had never set foot in Northampton-
, shire in my life until now. I stood staring and
puzzled, Then it all rushed across me. ‘The

giant stems of the oaks and Spanish chestnut,

 

glistening pale against a dark. background of fir’
and spruce, were for all the world like the end of
a clearing in Canada, or Western New York. I
had seen the same thing hundreds. of times: but
here there were. no. huge stumps left in the clear-
ing —no lumberer’s log hut — but smooth green
turf and trim gravel walks, and long settled peace
and plenty all about.

But now the silence was broken by strange
sounds overhead — clanking and rattling as of
chains smitten together, with wild hoarse cries.
The trees above us were bare and broken. Some
blight seemed to have fallen on them, and stripped
the bark, and torn the small branches, I looked
again, and in the blasted trees I saw huge birds
moving to and fro, and piling broken twigs into
rough untidy heaps. We were in the midst of the
heronry; and the herons were building their
nests; while the noise of clanking chains was made
by their long bills clappering together with a strange