flows beyond the lawn in front of the spacious goodly house--a river
alive with wild fowl, and overhung by lofty trees, in which many pairs
of herons build. A famous heronry has existed here for many years, and
the birds are held now by Mr. and Mrs. Stacpoole as sacred as are the
storks in Holland. Where the river widens to a lake, fine terraced
gardens and espalier walls, on which nectarines, apricots, and peaches
ripen in the sun, stretch along the shore. Deer come down to the further
bank to drink, and in every direction the eye is charmed and the mind is
soothed by the loveliest imaginable sylvan landscapes.

EDENVALE, _Sunday, Feb. 19._--I was awakened at dawn by the clamour of
countless wild ducks, to a day of sunshine as brilliant and almost as
warm as one sees at this season in the south of France. Mrs. Stacpoole
speaks of this place with a kind of passion, and I can quite understand
it. Clearly this, again, is not a case of the absentee landlord draining
the lifeblood of the land to lavish it upon an alien soil! The demesne
is a sylvan sanctuary for the wild creatures of the air and the wood,
and they congregate here almost as they did at Walton Hall in the days
of that most delightful of naturalists and travellers, whose adventurous
gallop on the back of a cayman was the delight of all English-reading
children forty years ago, or as they do now at Gosford. Yet the crack of
the gun, forbidden in the precincts of Walton Hall, is here by no means
unknown--the whole family being noted as dead shots. I asked Mr.
Stacpoole this morning whether the park had been invaded by trespassers
since the local Nationalists declared war upon him. He said that his
only experience of anything like an attack befell not very long ago,
when his people came to the house on a Sunday afternoon and told him
that a crowd of men from Ennis, with dogs, were coming towards the park
with a loudly proclaimed intent to enter it, and go hunting upon the
property.

Upon this Mr. Stacpoole left the house with his brother and another
person, and walked down to the park entrance. Presently the men of Ennis
made their appearance on the highway. A very brief parley followed. The
men of Ennis announced their intention of marching across the park, and
occupying it.

"I think not," the proprietor responded quietly. "I think you will go
back the way you came. For you may be sure of one thing: the first man
who crosses that park wall, or enters that