sloping garden there is a wicket, which
opens upon a lane as green as the lawn, very long, shady, and little
frequented; on the turf of this lane generally appear the first daisies
of spring--whence its name--Daisy Lane; serving also as a distinction to
the house.

It terminates (the lane I mean) in a valley full of wood; which
wood--chiefly oak and beech--spreads shadowy about the vicinage of a
very old mansion, one of the Elizabethan structures, much larger, as
well as more antique than Daisy Lane, the property and residence of
an individual familiar both to me and to the reader. Yes, in Hunsden
Wood--for so are those glades and that grey building, with many gables
and more chimneys, named--abides Yorke Hunsden, still unmarried; never,
I suppose, having yet found his ideal, though I know at least a score
of young ladies within a circuit of forty miles, who would be willing to
assist him in the search.

The estate fell to him by the death of his father, five years since; he
has given up trade, after having made by it sufficient to pay off some
incumbrances by which the family heritage was burdened. I say he abides
here, but I do not think he is resident above five months out of the
twelve; he wanders from land to land, and spends some part of each
winter in town: he frequently brings visitors with him when he comes to
----shire, and these visitors are often foreigners; sometimes he has
a German metaphysician, sometimes a French savant; he had once a
dissatisfied and savage-looking Italian, who neither sang nor played,
and of whom Frances affirmed that he had "tout l'air d'un conspirateur."

What English guests Hunsden invites, are all either men of Birmingham or
Manchester--hard men, seemingly knit up in one thought, whose talk is
of free trade. The foreign visitors, too, are politicians; they take a
wider theme--European progress--the spread of liberal sentiments over
the Continent; on their mental tablets, the names of Russia, Austria,
and the Pope, are inscribed in red ink. I have heard some of them talk
vigorous sense--yea, I have been present at polyglot discussions in the
old, oak-lined dining-room at Hunsden Wood, where a singular insight
was given of the sentiments entertained by resolute minds respecting old
northern despotisms, and old southern superstitions: also, I have heard
much twaddle, enounced chiefly in French and Deutsch, but let that pass.
Hunsden himself tolerated the drivelling theorists; with t