water, sunlight on wide meadows; but above all, setting a
difference between this orderly beauty and the wild splendours of some
western or northern moorland valley, the presence of befriending,
comrade man. The boats, the sails, the swans, the water flashing on the
oars; the neighbouring roofs, the patterned flower gardens, the comforts
of hotels at hand, the readiness with which it is all won and
enjoyed--those are some of the secrets of the ideal. It is the country
seen from an outdoor theatre.

[Illustration: _Palace Yard, Richmond._]

Richmond Park itself would be worth visiting for any countryman because
of its deer. Deer standing about in the bracken; deer asleep in thick
fern under great oaks; deer feeding slowly up wind on a distant slope of
green; deer leaping shadows of tree-stems one after another as if the
shadows were water, which is one of the deer's prettiest games in the
sun: deer trotting off as you try to come nearer to them, with that
curious quivering, shaking amble which is born of lissom daintiness and
muscles like steel; deer with hot sunlight on their coats--it is the
Richmond Park deer which are the creatures to come and see. How many are
there? Who should count them? Sixteen hundred fallow deer and fifty red
deer, the figures are given; Farnham Park, I think, comes next in
Surrey, with three hundred fallow deer.

The great palace has left little more than an archway on Richmond Green.
More history belongs to it, or rather to the succession of palaces which
have stood at Sheen, which was the old name, than I can deal with.
Edward III died at Sheen Palace, unloved and alone. Richard II's queen,
Anne of Bohemia, died there seventeen years later, and Richard in his
grief threw the palace down. It was rebuilt by Henry V, burnt down in
1497, rebuilt and renamed Richmond by Henry VII; then the Richmond who
named it died in his new palace. But the overmastering sense of
unhappiness which somehow has set itself about the story of Richmond
Palace belongs to the closing days of Elizabeth. Elizabeth's death, and
the month that went before it, patch English history like a week of
night. She had been so strong, so untiring, so wise in her council
chamber and so magnificent in her victorious fleet, and the fortune that
followed her like a wind; the life of her body had been so unfailing,
she had jested, wittily and coarsely, with so many courtiers; she had
commanded the chivalry of young and splendid nobl