icture, and the artist by stealth sketched his
likeness from a closet near the staircase of Kensington Palace, where he
had an excellent view of the peculiar monarch. It is, as Thackeray says,
the picture of a "red-faced, staring princeling," but is believed true
to nature nevertheless. Lady Suffolk, it seems, was one of his few
favorites. Audley End has been for a long time in possession of the
Barons of Braybrooke, and is their principal seat. Lord Cornwallis, of
American Revolutionary remembrance, was a member of this family, and his
portrait is preserved here.

[Illustration: VIEWS IN SAFFRON WALDEN.

1. Town-Hall. 2. Church. 3. Entrance to the Town.]

Over the undulating surface of the park, barely a mile away, can be seen
the pretty spire of Saffron Walden Church, with the village clustering
around it. Here on a hill stand the church and the castle, originally of
Walden, but from the extensive cultivation of saffron in the
neighborhood the town came to have that prefix given it; it was grown
there from the time of Edward III., and the ancient historian Fuller
quaintly tells us "it is a most admirable cordial, and under God I owe
my life, when sick with the small-pox, to the efficacy thereof." Fuller
goes on to tell us that "the sovereign power of genuine saffron is
plainly proved by the antipathy of the crocodile thereto; for the
crocodile's tears are never true save when he is forced where saffron
groweth, whence he hath his name of croco-deilos, or the saffron-fearer,
knowing himself to be all poison, and it all antidote." Saffron attained
its highest price at Walden in Charles II.'s time, when it was as high
as twenty dollars a pound, but its disuse in medicine caused its value
to diminish, and at the close of the last century its culture had
entirely disappeared from Walden, though the prefix still clings to the
name of the town. While saffron was declining, this neighborhood became
a great producer of truffles, and the dogs were trained here to hunt the
fungus that is so dear to the epicure's palate. The church of St. Mary,
which is a fine Perpendicular structure and the most conspicuous feature
of Saffron Walden, was built about four hundred years ago, though the
slender spire crowning its western tower is of later date, having been
built in the present century. In the church are buried the six Earls of
Suffolk who lived at Audley End, and all of whom died between 1709 and
1745. The ruins of the ancient ca