* *

Three hundred yards of smooth, broad, white road, leading from Henfield,
a small town in Sussex. It disappears in the woods which lean across the
fields towards the downs. The great bluff heights can be seen, and at
the point where the roads cross, where the tall trunks are listed with
golden light, stands a large wooden gate and a small box-like lodge. A
lonely place in a densely-populated county. The gatekeeper is blind, and
his flute sounds doleful and strange, and the leaves are falling.

The private road is short and stony. Apparently space was found for it
with difficulty, and it got wedged between an enormous holly hedge and a
stiff wooden paling. But overhead the great branches fight upwards
through a tortuous growth to the sky, and, as you advance, Thornby Place
continues to puzzle you with its medley of curious and contradictory
aspects. For as the second gate, which is in iron, is approached, your
thoughts of rural things are rudely scattered by sight of what seems a
London mews. Reason with yourself. This very urban feature is occasioned
by the high brick wall which runs parallel with the stables, and this,
as you pass round to the front of the house, is hidden in the clothing
foliage of a line of evergreen oaks; continuing along the lawn, the
trees bend about the house--a wash of Naples-yellow, a few sharp Italian
lines and angles. To complete the sketch, indicate the wings of the
blown rooks on the sullen sky.

But our purpose lies deeper than that which inspires a water-colour
sketch. We must learn when and why that house was built; we must see how
the facts reconcile its somewhat tawdry, its somewhat suburban aspect,
with the richer and more romantic aspects of the park. The park is even
now, though it be the middle of autumn, full of blowing green, and the
brown circling woods, full of England and English home life. That single
tree in the foreground is a lime; what a splendour of leafage it will be
in the summer! Those four on the right are chestnuts, and those far
away, lying between us and the imperial downs, are elms; through that
vista you can see the grand line, the abrupt hollows, and the bit of
chalk road cut zig-zag out of the steep side. Then why the anomaly of
Italian urns and pilasters; why not red Elizabethan gables and diamond
casements?

Why not? Because at the beginning of the century, when Brighton was
being built, fragments of architectural gossip were flying about Su