Yet this visit leaves nothing especially to remember except a story of Lord Waterford pursuing a robber who had broken into his house, finding him in a public-house some four miles off, and convicting him amongst a number of other men by insisting upon feeling all their hearts; the man whose heart was still beating quickly was the one who had just done running.
“On Saturday I came to Wells, the lovely old city of orchards and clear running brooks, whence Lord Hylton fetched me to Ammerdown. Sir Augustus Paget and all his family are here, the daughter a lovely, bright, natural girl,[350] and the sons, Victor and Ralph, most charming, kind-hearted, winning fellows. We have been to Mells—an overgrown park with pretty natural features, which was the favourite manor of the Abbot of Glastonbury. At the dissolution, Mr. Horner was sent to take up the parchments of the abbatial lands to Windsor, and for better security took them in a pasty. On the way he put in his thumb and pulled out for himself the title-deeds of Mells, the best plum of all, which has ever since remained in the family of ‘Little Jack Horner.’”
“Ryde, Oct. 10.—I have spent a quiet, peaceful summer: so little from the outer world seems to ruffle me now, and the storms of four terrible years have been succeeded by six years of calm. It has been a constant pleasure to visit the dear Mrs. Grove, now confined to the upper floor of her house. Charlotte Leycester has been long at Holmhurst, and other guests have come and gone, relics from my dearest Mother’s life, and waifs and strays from my own, by many of whom I am sadly overrated; the moral of which is, I suppose, that one should try really to clamber up to that high shelf on which one is placed in imagination. Of original work I have done little enough, except one article on ‘Lucca’ for Good Words.
“One of my chief occupations has been editing the life of the nun Amalie von Lassaux, translated from the German by Fräulein von Weling. As ‘Sister Augustine,’ her story possesses that interest which is always attached to a struggle in the cause of truth amid many persecutions and torments, rather mental than physical.
“I was away twice for a few days—first with young Mrs. Hamilton Seymour at Aylesford, a charming little old town on the sluggish Medway, with ‘The Friars’ close by, where pleasant Lady Aylesford lives in a beautiful old house, with oak staircase, gateway, water-gate, clipped yew-trees and terraces. Then I was two days at Hampton Court with witty old Lady Lyndhurst, and greatly delighted in the glories of the old palace and its gardens. And now I am with dear old George Liddell,[351] enjoying this otherwise dull watering-place through his genial hospitality.”
“Melchet, Hants, Oct. 23.—From Ryde I went to Amesbury to stay with Sir Edmund and Lady Antrobus, who are some of the kindest and most hospitable people in London, and have a fine house in Piccadilly. Their house in Wiltshire is very fine too, though it has never been finished. Gay’s Duchess of Queensberry lived there, and in the grounds are a cave and summer-house where the poet wrote verses to her. But the great interest of Amesbury lies in its being the scene of Guinevere’s penance, and it recalls Tennyson’s poem in the swirling mists which arise with morning and evening. Each morning we drew at Stonehenge amongst the hoary and mighty stones standing out against the ethereal lights and shadows of the plain.
“Next, I went to Rushmore, to which the Lane Fox’s have succeeded, with the name of Pitt Rivers and £36,000 a year, since the death of the 6th Lord Rivers. It is a dull country-house on Cranbourne Chase—swooping moors sprinkled with thorn-trees or thick woods of hazel. I was taken to see Shaftesbury; Cranbourne, the fine old house of the Salisburys; and Wardour, with noble cedars too closely overhanging the ruins of its castle. Lord Arundel lives in the Park at Wardour, in an immense house which he is too poor to keep in repair. He has another place somewhere near the sea, where his grandfather went to reside, to the great discomfiture of a gang of smugglers, who had previously had sole possession, and who tried to frighten him away by ghostly sights and sounds, but in vain. One night Lord Arundel was sitting in his room, having locked the door, when some one knocked. He demanded who was there, when a voice said, ‘Open and you will see:’ He opened it, and found a very rough-looking man with a keg of spirits under his arm. The man said, ‘Well, my Lord, we’ve done our best to frighten you, but you won’t be frightened, so I’ve, come to make a clean breast of it, and I’ve brought you a little offering. I only hope you won’t be hard on us.’ ‘Oh, dear no, I won’t be hard on you,’ said Lord Arundel; and Lady Marian Alford, to whom he told the story at Rome when she was four years old, vividly remembers his vigorous assertion, ‘And the smuggler gave me the very best Hollands I ever had in my life.’
“From Rushmore, after a visit to the old Shipley home at Twyford, I came here to Lady Ashburton. Melchet is a magnificent house in a beautiful country, and is filled with art-treasures of every kind. Lady Marian is here, always pleasant with her ripple of conversation and anecdote. She has been very amusing about her mother’s parrot, which used to hop about upon the lawn. One day it was carried off by an eagle. Old John Tooch, one of the dynasty of John Toochs who worked in the garden, was mowing the lawn, and as the parrot, in the eagle’s gripe, was sailing over his head, he heard a voice in the air call out, ‘We’re ridin’ noo, John Tooch, we’re ridin’ noo;’ at which strange sound the eagle was so dreadfully frightened that he let the parrot fall, so that John Tooch took it home to its cage again.”
“Melchet, Oct. 28.—Yesterday we went to Longford—Lord Radnor’s—a great castellated house in a dull park, with no view, but very fine pictures.
“In the morning the (Melchet) footman woke me with the news that the house had been broken into. The robbers had entered through the drawing-room window, perambulated the lower apartments, drunk up all the wine in the dining-room, and found all the valuables too big to carry off!”