It is a handsome, although inhospitable village that has grown up at the bidding of the master of millions whose coroneted “I” stares you out of countenance from every red-brick cottage. Architectural taste is evident in the schools, the beautiful estate office, the village hall, the post office, and the village in general. All around, on the warrens, the waterless hills are dotted with wells, and the whole estate provided with the most exquisitely steam-rolled roads, and cared for as no one ever could have cared for it before. Yet it is not unpleasing to one who has experienced the courtesy of the Maharajah in years bygone to find that the memory of the “Black Prince,” as he was here affectionately known, is still cherished at Elveden, even though it is now owned by the, as far as mere lucre goes, more princely prince of black beer.
Elveden Park forms one side of the village street, and through the trees the golden glitter of pinnacles can be seen, leading the stranger to think his eyes have rested on the Hall. But those are merely the stables, where the horses are housed in a manner that might almost have contented Heliogabalus. The stables at Sandringham are not so lavish, but then, of course, they belong merely to the King. The Hall itself is not externally so flamboyant, and is in essentials the staid Italian Renaissance of some years ago. But once within, it is a gorgeous display of wealth rejoicing in itself and attempting feats resembling the painting of the lily and the gilding of refined gold. You pass from an oak-panelled entrance hall, with doors barbarically sheathed in glittering patterned metal and flanked by passages whose coved ceilings are covered with Renaissance designs in raised plaster, into a domed central hall of pure white marble, designed in the Indian style and most elaborately carved and fretted in that extravagant Oriental taste. It is like coming from the Hotel Metropole into a first-class mausoleum, and when you enter you cannot help thinking you are dead and buried and laid to rest in an inferior copy of the Taj Mahal. This extravagant feature, newly completed, is said to have cost £10,000.
As one leaves the Park the lions of Lahore are noticed, still decorating the stone gateways. Near by is Elveden church, the only remaining vestige of the old village: a humble little place, with mural monument and medallion portrait of Admiral Keppel and an east window to the memory of the Maharajah Duleep Singh and Bamba, his wife.
So we will leave Elveden, cut adrift, save in this sole respect, from old times. Useless to look for the “Hare and Hounds” posting-house, where the post-chaises changed horses, and equally fruitless to seek the old toll-house, the scene on October 25th, 1825, of an accident to the “Magnet” coach, on its way from London to Norwich, when the leaders shied as they were passing through the gate and the coach was upset, with the result that an outside passenger, a widow from Hargham, was killed.
XXXIII
The 3¾ miles onwards to Thetford were known and dreaded in the old days as “Thetford Heath.” Elveden Gap, passed on the way, is the name of a clump of firs, marking where the boundaries of estates and parishes run. Beyond it stretches the lonely heath. Pollard, in his terrifying print of the “Norwich Mail in a Thunderstorm,” makes this the scene of a very dramatic picture, with the lightning horribly forky and the rain very slanty and penetrating. Thetford Heath was an ill place on such an occasion; but the elements were not the chiefest of its dangers, which in any year from mediæval times until modern were rather to be expected at the hands of man.
ELVEDEN GAP.
There still exists in the old church of St. George Colegate, Norwich, a tragical epitaph to the memory of a traveller slain on these wild wastes in those dangerous times. It is engraved on a ledger-stone forming a part of the flooring at the west end of the nave, and is hidden from the gaze of the casual visitor only by the matting. A skull and cross-bones are placed above the inscription, which runs:—
“Here Lyeth ye Body of Mr. Bryant Lewis, who