-faced,
rough babies an airing; delightful beastkins. And I almost liked Mrs.
Senter for having a cousin who owns one of these ponies as a pet, a
dwarf one, no bigger than a St. Bernard dog. It wears a collar with
silver bells, follows her everywhere, thinks nothing of curling up on a
drawing-room sofa, and once was found on its mistress's bed, asleep on a
new Paris hat.

The enticing rose-bowered cottages we passed ought to have told me that
we were back in Hampshire again, if the New Forest hadn't seemed to a
poor little foreigner like a separate county all by itself. It would be
no credit to a bride to clamour for love in such a cottage, and turn up
her nose at palaces. She might be married at the beautiful church of
Lyndhurst (a most immediate jewel of a church, with an exquisite
altar-piece by Lord Leighton, a Flaxman, and a startlingly fine piece of
sculpture by an artist named Cockerell), then, safely wedded, plunge
with her bridegroom into the Forest, and be perfectly happy without ever
coming out again. I wish I had had the "Forest Lovers" to re-read while
we were there. I think Maurice Hewlett must have got part of his
inspiration in those mysterious green "walks" which lead away into that
land where fairy lore and historic legend go hand in hand.

Lyndhurst, which King George III. loved, is pretty, but we didn't stop
to look at it, because we were coming back that way. After seeing the
church which, though modern, I wouldn't have missed for a great deal, we
spun on to Beaulieu Abbey, the home of a hero of motoring. There we saw
a perfect house, rising among trees, and sharing with the sky a clear
sheet of water as a mirror. Once this was a guest-house for the Abbey;
now it's called the Palace House, and deserves its name. Its
looking-glass is really only a long creek, which spills out of the
Solent, but it seems like a lake; and you've only to walk along a meadow
path to the refectory of the old abbey. From there you go through a
mysterious door into the ruined cloisters, which used to belong to the
Cistercians--the "White Monks." King John provided money for the
building; which proves that it's an ill wind which blows no one any
good, because the stingy, tyrannical old king wouldn't have given a
penny to the abbots if they hadn't scourged him in a nightmare he had. I
shan't soon forget the magnolia and the myrtle in the quadrangle, and if
I were one of the long-vanished monks, I should haunt the place. Ther