irps to
the tune of 'mamma! mamma!', the bright-faced fairy, whose tiny feet
come pattering along, making a merry music, mamma's own Frances! And
following her guidance, here we are in the dear round room time enough
to catch the last rays of the sun, as they light the noble landscape
which lies like a panorama around us, lingering longest on that long
island of old thorns and stunted oaks, the oasis of B. Heath, and then
vanishing in a succession of gorgeous clouds.

October 28th.--Another soft and brilliant morning. But the pleasures
of to-day must be written in shorthand. I have left myself no room for
notes of admiration.

First we drove about the coppice: an extensive wood of oak, and elm, and
beech, chiefly the former, which adjoins the park-paling of F. Hill, of
which demesne, indeed, it forms one of the most delightful parts. The
roads through the coppice are studiously wild; so that they have the
appearance of mere cart-tracks: and the manner in which the ground
is tumbled about, the steep declivities, the sunny slopes, the sudden
swells and falls, now a close narrow valley, then a sharp ascent to an
eminence commanding an immense extent of prospect, have a striking air
of natural beauty, developed and heightened by the perfection of art.
All this, indeed, was familiar to me; the colouring only was new. I had
been there in early spring, when the fragrant palms were on the willow,
and the yellow tassels on the hazel, and every twig was swelling
with renewed life; and I had been there again and again in the green
leafiness of midsummer; but never as now, when the dark verdure of the
fir-plantations, hanging over the picturesque and unequal paling, partly
covered with moss and ivy, contrasts so remarkably with the shining
orange-leaves of the beech, already half fallen, the pale yellow of the
scattering elm, the deeper and richer tints of the oak, and the glossy
stems of the 'lady of the woods,' the delicate weeping birch. The
underwood is no less picturesque. The red-spotted leaves and redder
berries of the old thorns, the scarlet festoons of the bramble, the tall
fern of every hue, seem to vie with the brilliant mosaic of the ground,
now covered with dead leaves and strewn with fir-cones, now, where a
little glade intervenes, gay with various mosses and splendid fungi. How
beautiful is this coppice to-day! especially where the little spring,
as clear as crystal, comes bubbling out from the old 'fantastic' beech