it shine so crystalline clear. I have a thousand vivid miniatures of
it in my mind and all of them are beautiful to me, so that I could quite
easily write a whole book of landscapes from the Park alone. I can still
recall quite vividly the warm beauty-soaked sensation of going out into
the morning sunshine of the Park, with my lunch in a little green Swiss
tin under my arm and the vast interminable day all before me, the
gigantic, divinely unconditional day that only boyhood knows, and the
Park so great and various that it was more than two hours' going for me
to reach its eastern fences. I was only a little older then than you are
now. Sometimes I went right up through the woods to the house to
companion with Philip and Guy Christian and their sister--I loved her
then, and one day I was to love her with all my heart--but in those
boyish times I liked most to go alone.

My memories of the Park are all under blue sky and sunshine, with just a
thunderstorm or so; on wet days and cold days I was kept to closer
limits; and it seems to me now rather an intellectual conviction than a
positive memory that save for a few pine-clad patches in the extreme
south-east, its soil was all thick clay. That meant for me only
beautiful green marshes, a number of vividly interesting meres upon the
course of its stream, and a wealth of gigantic oaks. The meres lay at
various levels, and the hand of Lady Ladislaw had assisted nature in
their enrichment with lilies and water plants. There were places of
sedge and scented rush, amidst which were sapphire mists of
forget-me-not for long stretches, skirmishing commandoes of yellow iris
and wide wastes of floating water-lilies. The gardens passed insensibly
into the Park, and beyond the house were broad stretches of grass,
sun-lit, barred with the deep-green shadows of great trees, and animated
with groups and lines of fallow deer. Near the house was an Italianate
garden, with balustradings and statuary, and a great wealth of roses and
flowering shrubs.

Then there were bracken wildernesses in which the does lurked with the
young fawns, and a hollow, shallow and wide, with the turf greatly
attacked by rabbits, and exceptionally threadbare, where a stricken oak,
lightning-stripped, spread out its ghastly arms above contorted rotting
branches and the mysterious skeletons of I should think five several
deer. In the evening-time the woods behind this place of bones--they
were woods of straight-gro