s 'Queen Oglethorpe.' We propose to tell,
for the first time, the real story of this lady and her sisters.

The story centres round The Meath Home for Incurables! This excellent
institution occupies Westbrook Place, an old house at Godalming, close
to the railway, which passes so close as to cut off one corner of the
park, and of the malodorous tanyard between the remnant of grounds and
the river Wey that once washed them. On an October day, the Surrey
hills standing round about in shadowy distances, the silence of two
centuries is scarcely broken by the rustle of leaves dropping on their
own deep carpet, and the very spirit of a lost cause dwells here,
slowly dying. The house stands backed by a steep wooded hill, beyond
which corn-fields 'clothe the wold and meet the sky;' the mansion is a
grey, two-storied parallelogram flanked by square towers of only
slighter elevation; their projecting bays surmounted by open-work
cornices of leafy tracery in whiter stone.

The tale used to run (one has heard it vaguely in conversation) that
the old house at Godalming is haunted by the ghost of Prince Charlie,
and one naturally asks, 'What is _he_ doing there?' What he was doing
there will appear later.

In 1688, the year of the _Regifugium_, Westbrook Place was sold to
Theophilus Oglethorpe, who had helped to drive

the Whigs
Frae Bothwell Brigs,

and, later, to rout Monmouth at Sedgemoor. This gentleman married
Eleanor Wall, of an Irish family, a Catholic--'a cunning devil,' says
Swift. The pair had five sons and four daughters, about whom county
histories and dictionaries of biography blunder in a helpless fashion.
We are concerned with Anne Henrietta, born, probably, about 1680-83,
Eleanor (1684), James (June 1, 1688, who died in infancy), and Frances
Charlotte, Bolingbroke's 'Fanny Oglethorpe.' The youngest brother,
James Edward, born 1696, became the famous philanthropist, General
Oglethorpe, governor of Georgia, patron of the Wesleys, and, in
extreme old age, the 'beau' of Hannah More, and the gentleman who
remembered shooting snipe on the site of Conduit Street.

After the Revolution Sir Theophilus was engaged with Sir John Fenwick,
was with him when he cocked his beaver in the face of the Princess of
Orange, had to fly to France, after the failure at La Hogue, and in
1693 was allowed to settle peacefully at Westbrook Place. Anne and
Eleanor were left in France, where they were brought up as