THE WASHINGTONS? ENGLISH HOME,

metallic sound, as they flapped backwards and
forwards quarrelling over the possession of some

 

favorite fork
in the trees
that they
are gradu-
_ally destroy-
ing. John
Washington
must have
often seen
the ancestors of those great gray. birds; for in
the Althorp Steward’s Books that I have al-
ready quoted mention is constantly made of the
“ hearnes.”

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    

41

One day “Creaton” gets three shillings, for
climbing nine herons’ nests. A. day after “four-
teen hearnes”
are sent to
Wormleighton ;
young ones I
suppose that
Creaton took out of the nests,
In one week some years later,
twenty-five herons’ nests are
climbed. ‘“ Hearnes” are sent
‘as presents to Lady Washington and the neigh-
bors, and so forth. But I shall have more to tell
you about the herons before I let you go, so let us
leave them screaming and quarrelling and push
on into the park.

At length another avenue, with one fallen

=a
ww

\ giant elm lying across it — measuring eighty feet

from where it split off some thirty feet from the
ground —led us down towards the house. And
then a gate in the deer-fence let us into the garden
and arboretum, with rows of ancient
trees marking its confines.. The
emerald turf was studded with thou-
sands of gay little winter aconites
lifting their yellow heads to the sun
out of their petticoats of close green
leaves, and countless snowdrops
ringing their dainty white bells,
looking like downy patches of new-
fallen snow on the grass. Among
the beautiful groups of rare and
curious trees we wandered on till
we came to the “ Oval’”’—an oval
pond, some three hundred yards
long — covered with tiny dabchicks,
and busy coots and moor hens
who perpetually chased each other through the
water on to the island in the middle, and disap-
peared among the scarlet fringe of dogwood, to
emerge on the other side ready for a fresh chase
and frolic. Stately swans basked in the sunshine
on the water, or stretched their long necks and
shook their white wings on shore. Up from the
water sloped banks of smooth-shaven turf; and

some fifty feet back from the pond rose an encir-

cling line of huge single trees, any one of which was
a.study in itself, and in whose tall tops jackdaws
kept up an. incessant chatter over their housebuild-
ing and love-making.