"And every air was heavy with the sighs
Of orange groves,"—
or the strong, spicy perfume of strange trees and plants unknown in this cold climate.
Over seventy thousand square feet of glass are between the iron ribs of the great roof of this conservatory, and within its ample space the soil and temperature are carefully arranged to suit the nature and characters of the different plants it contains, while neither expense nor pains are spared to obtain and cultivate these vegetable curiosities in their native luxuriance and beauty.
I will not attempt a particular description of the other green-houses. There are thirty in all, and each devoted to different kinds of fruits or flowers—a study for the horticulturist or botanist. One was devoted entirely to medicinal plants, another to rare and curious flowering plants, gay in all the hues of the rainbow, and rich with perfume; a Victoria Regia house, just completed, of octagon form, and erected expressly for the growth of this curious product of South American waters; magnificent graperies, four or five in all, and seven hundred feet long, with the green, white, and purple clusters depending in every direction and in various stages of growth, from blossom to perfection; pineries containing whole regiments of the fruit, ranged in regular ranks, with their martial blades erect above their green and yellow coats of mail. Peach-houses, with the pink blossoms just bursting into beauty, were succeeded by the fruit, first like vegetable grape-shot, and further on in great, luscious, velvet-coated spheroids at maturity, as it drops from the branches into netting spread to catch it.
In the peach-houses is one tree, fifteen feet high, and its branches extending on the walls a distance of over fifty feet, producing, some years, over a thousand peaches. Then there are strawberry-houses, apricot, vegetable, and even a house for mushrooms, besides the extensive kitchen gardens, in which every variety of ordinary vegetable is grown; all of these nurseries, gardens, hot-houses, and conservatories are well cared for, and kept in excellent order.
The great conservatory is said to have cost one hundred thousand pounds; it is heated by steam and hot water, and there are over six miles of piping in the building. The duke's table, whether he be here or at London, is supplied daily with rare fruits and the other products of these hot-beds of luxury.
But the reader will tire of reading, as does the visitor of viewing, the endless evidences of the apparently boundless wealth that almost staggers the conception of the American tourist fresh from home, with his ideas of what constitutes wealth and power in a republican country.
After having visited, as we have, one of the most magnificent modern palaces of one of the most princely of modern England's noblemen, it was a pleasant transition to ride over to one of the most perfect remnants of the habitations of her feudal nobility, Haddon Hall, situated in Derbyshire, a few miles from Chatsworth.
This fine old castellated building is one from which can be formed a correct idea of those old strongholds of the feudal lords of the middle ages; indeed, it is a remnant of one of those very strongholds, a crumbling picture of the past, rich in its fine old coloring of chivalry and romance, conjuring up many poetic fancies, and putting to flight others, by the practical realities that it presents in the shape of what would be now positive discomfort in our domestic life, but which, in those rude days, was magnificence.