stretch of woodland lake-water. It is, of course,
not a natural sheet, but its designer had skill enough to know what
would not look unnatural. He was Thomas Sandby, Royal Academician and
Deputy-Ranger of Windsor Park, and one of the great landscape gardeners
of Georgian days. He planned the lake for the Duke of Cumberland, Ranger
of Windsor Park after Culloden, and he made it by choking back a number
of small streams that trickled through a reedy marsh, and so spreading a
single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most
of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the
water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and
eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of
the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that
remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his
obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or June,
when the green leaf is high on the beeches or the copper leaf strewn
below them, and in any month of the year the thick, deep moss of the
open glades is a carpet to delight to walk upon. But not all Sandby's
landscape gardening has an equal charm. The cascade which drains the
outflow of the water is a pretentious pile which no doubt filled the eye
of the royal Ranger, and perhaps would have pleased John Evelyn, but it
suits a simpler taste very little. But "the ruins"--it is their vague
and proper name--are worse. Once, on the southern shore, stood a
classical temple. It was the genuine article; the pillars were brought
direct from Tripoli; the Ranger of the day (for they were added after
the Cumberland era) liked to have them there, and thought that the
beauty of English woodlands was enhanced by a pagan altar and Greek
porticoes. Northern rains and northern ivy have done their work, and
"the ruins" remain--capitals, columns, and pedestals shouting a thousand
Cockney scribbles, tumbled headlong under laurel and yew.

Like other large stretches of Surrey water, the lake has become the home
of wildfowl once passing from the stage of rarity to extinction, but now
increasing and more often seen. The reeds that line parts of the shore
are the happy homes of coots and water hens, but mallards and ducks are
common on the water, and I have watched more than one pair of great
grebes, conspicuous on the level lake with their gleaming necks and
chestnut ruffs, swimming and diving