the beaten Royalists lashed their horses on to Brentford.
Nor did I forget that the renowned Addison had lived here after his
unhappy marriage with Lady Warwick, and had often ridden hence to
Button's Coffee House in town, where my grandfather had had his dinner
with Dean Swift.

We sat gazing at the building, which was bathed in the early sun, at the
deer and sheep grazing in the park, at the changing colours of the young
leaves as the breeze swayed them. The market wagons had almost ceased
now, and there was little to break the stillness.

"You love the place?" I said.

He started, as though I had awakened him out of a sleep. And he was no
longer the Fox of the clubs, the cynical, the reckless. He was no longer
the best-dressed man in St. James's Street, or the aggressive youngster
of St. Stephen's.

"Love it!" he cried. "Ay, Richard, and few guess how well. You will
not laugh when I tell you that my happiest days have been passed here,
when I was but a chit, in the long room where Addison used to walk up and
down composing his Spectators: or trotting after my father through these
woods and gardens. A kinder parent does not breathe than he. Well I
remember how he tossed me in his arms under that tree when I had thrashed
another lad for speaking ill of him. He called me his knight. In all my
life he has never broken faith with me. When they were blasting down a
wall where those palings now stand, he promised me I should see it done,
and had it rebuilt and blown down again because I had missed the sight.
All he ever exacted of me was that I should treat him as an elder
brother. He had his own notion of the world I was going into, and
prepared me accordingly. He took me from Eton to Spa, where I learned
gaming instead of Greek, and gave me so much a night to risk at play."

I looked at him in astonishment. To say that I thought these relations
strange would have been a waste of words.

"To be sure," Charles continued, "I was bound to learn, and could acquire
no younger." He flicked the glossy red backs of his horses with his
whip. "You are thinking it an extraordinary education, I know," he added
rather sadly. "I hav a-told you this--God knows why! Yes, because I
like you damnably, and you would have heard worse elsewhere, both of him
and of me. I fear you have listened to the world's opinion of Lord
Holland."

Indeed, I had heard a deal of that nobleman's peculations of the public
funds. But in this he was no wo