VIEW FROM A BALCONY.
BEDFORD PARK.
FIVE years ago I happened to pass through Chiswick, near London, and paused near a field where Prince Rupert and his little army camped overnight, on their retreat before Hampden and his Roundheads—a scene which the perspective of time has made into an allegorical tableau of Aristocracy retreating before Yeomanry. (It is a retreat that steadily goes on still.) At that time I found it pleasant to see large and beautiful gardens, with stately poplars and every variety of fruit-tree, glorifying the acres once steeped with the bluest blood of England. Eight hundred Cavaliers were here found dead when the Roundheads came in the early morning, glowing with victory, to pitch their tents where the Cavaliers had just folded theirs. Last year I turned in to take another look at the same place. I paused again near the Rupert House—surely a very civil-seeming home for the barbaric prince whose name was twisted into “Prince Robber.” Two lions couch above the projecting door-way, two child-figures stand on the ground beneath, which may be emblems of that ferocity for which the prince was famed beyond all warriors of his time, until he fell in love with the pretty actress under whose sway he became gentle as a child.
I meant to enter on the grass-covered Roman Road along which the prince retreated some seventeen centuries after the Romans made it. Here Roman coins and bits of ancient tile have been found, are still occasionally found. At any rate, it is well enough to keep one’s eyes sharp upon the ground for a few hundred yards. But first another good look at the beautiful gardens which cover the camp of the Cavaliers—gardens planned and planted by Lindley, the famous horticulturist and botanist, father of the present Mr. Justice Lindley.
Angels and ministers of grace! am I dreaming? Right before me is the apparition of a little red town made up of quaintest Queen Anne houses. It is visible through the railway arch, as it might be a lunette picture projected upon a landscape. Surely my eyes are cheating me; they must have been gathering impressions of by-gone architecture along the riverside Malls, and are now turning them to visions, and building them by ideal mirage into this dream of old-time homesteads!