e, so Sir William Hamilton thought, the property was
acquired a thousand pounds cheaper than it otherwise might have
been--a piece of financial good luck rare in Nelson's experience. "We
have now inhabited your Lordship's premises some days," continued the
old knight, "and I can now speak with some certainty. I have lived
with our dear Emma several years. I know her merit, have a great
opinion of the head and heart that God Almighty has been pleased to
give her; but a seaman alone could have given a fine woman full power
to chuse and fit up a residence for him without seeing it himself. You
are in luck, for in my conscience I verily believe that a place so
suitable to your views could not have been found, and at so cheap a
rate. The proximity to the capital,"--Nelson found it an hour's drive
from Hyde Park--"and the perfect retirement of this place, are, for
your Lordship, two points beyond estimation; but the house is so
comfortable, the furniture clean and good, and I never saw so many
conveniences united in so small a compass. You have nothing but to
come and enjoy immediately; you have a good mile of pleasant dry walk
around your own farm. It would make you laugh to see Emma and her
mother fitting up pig-sties and hencoops, and already the Canal is
enlivened with ducks, and the cock is strutting with his hens about
the walks."

As time passed, Sir William did not realize the comfort he had
anticipated from surroundings so pleasant as those he described. He
was troubled in money matters, fearing lest he might be distressed to
meet the current expenses of the house. "If we had given up the house
in Piccadilly," he lamented to Greville, "the living here would indeed
be a great saving; but, as it is, we spend neither more nor less than
we did." Why he did not give it up does not appear. As Lady Paramount
over the owner of the place, Lady Hamilton insisted upon entertaining
to a degree consonant to the taste neither of Lord Nelson, who was
only too pleased to humor her whims, nor of her husband, who had an
old man's longing for quiet, and, besides, was not pleased to find
himself relegated to a place in her consideration quite secondary to
that of his host. "It is but reasonable," he wrote to Greville, in
January, 1802, "after having fagged all my life, that my last days
should pass off comfortably and quietly. Nothing at present disturbs
me but my debt, and the nonsense I am obliged to submit to here to
avoid coming to