Reynard is making for Coombes's Wood, but the earths were all stopped this morning at four o'clock; so away he speeds again, leaving the rectory and its lovely meadows and the dear old church below us—away past the bogs where the cotton-grass and the flycatcher, the blue gentian and the yellow asphodel, grow among the treacherous tussocks—away to Eversley Wood. Here the same fate—a fagot or three or four sods in the mouth of each hole—awaits him; so, changing his tactics, he strikes boldly across Hartfordbridge Flats for Lord Calthorpe's woods at Elvetham.
And now woe to the unwary or to the newcomer who thinks our heather-covered moors are all plain sailing! for along them run long lines of ruts, the remains of the old pack-road of the Middle Ages, worn by the traffic of centuries and now covered deep in purple heath. The only way to get over them, unless you stop and walk, is to jump boldly into the middle like the man in the nursery rhyme, and then jump out again: horses that have been in the country for a while soon learn to do this. But some luckless ensign who has lately joined his regiment at Aldershot comes down bodily, and horse and man roll and struggle in the deep ruts which William the Conqueror's pack-horses helped to tread out as they came from London to Winchester.
Now the woods are drawing near, and we cross the old London road, the high-road between the metropolis and Southampton, along which ninety stagecoaches ran every day in the good old times. A mile off to our right, down Star Hill, lies the famous White Lion Inn, now a miserable pot-house, where George IV. used to stay, and where, on the day that the London and South-western Railway was opened, the old ostler cut his throat in sheer despair, for Othello's occupation was gone. Ten miles up the road lies Bagshot Heath, the terror of travellers in those coaching days. There stood, and stands still, a little wayside inn called the Golden Farmer, where many of the coaches stopped to water the horses. The wearied travellers of the end of last century, touched by the tender solicitude of the charming landlord, confided to his sympathetic ear their fears of the highwaymen who were said to infest the heath. Cheered and encouraged with assurances from their host of the perfect safety of the particular road they intended taking, the travellers set out. But usually, when they had gone about a mile, the coach would stop with a sudden jerk, and a masked man on a magnificent horse would ride up, pistol in hand, and demand their money or their life. Sometimes serious encounters took place with this leader and his band, and then the wounded and terrified victims would drag themselves back to the Golden Farmer, where the host, full of commiseration for their misfortunes, would lavish care and kindness upon them. This went on for years, and it was not until hundreds of robberies had been committed that the discovery was made of the identity of the fascinating landlord and the desperate captain of the highwaymen.
Many are the tales the old people at Eversley used to tell of the "gentlemen of the road" in their fathers' and grandfathers' time. Even in quiet Eversley itself a curate lived some hundred years ago whose strange career ended on the gallows. He owned a splendid black horse which no one ever saw him mount. But it was whispered that if any one peeped into its stable in the morning the beautiful creature was seen covered with foam, bathed in perspiration, trembling as if it had just come in from a long gallop; and at last it was found out that Parson Darby belonged to the gang of highwaymen on Bagshot Heath. He was caught red-handed, and hanged close to the Golden Farmer in chains on a gibbet of which the posts were still standing forty years ago. But what became of his black horse no one ever could tell me. Now the London road is as safe and quiet as any other well-kept highway, and the wildest passengers upon it are a few wandering gypsies, who travel up and down it from fair to race and from race to fair.
But Reynard is speeding away through the pleasant fir woods, and we are following him as fast as we can lay legs to ground—scrambling over the rotten banks, scurrying along the soft rides, lying low on our saddles to avoid the sweeping boughs, and watching with all our eyes for the slippery roots that crawl along the surface of the sandy soil. Down through the bogs, across the bridge by the home farm, past the park, into the fallow fields, with half a dozen tremendous fences which send my heart up into my throat till Sintram lands me safe over each, into the fir woods again, up to the foot of the Queen's Mounts; and there, where good Queen Bess sat and watched the deer being driven up to her feet, do we run into our gallant fox, and a "Whoo-hoop!" from Tom proclaims that Reynard is no more.
But our run has led us far from home, and while the hounds trot on to Dogmersfield Park to draw the coverts of the descendants of the old regicide Mildmay, let us wend our way once more to Bramshill and linger a while longer about the terraces and gardens of the dear old house.
Come back with me, gentle reader, through the iron gates under the crumbling archways of the pleasaunce, where the Virginia creeper twines its delicate wreaths and glorifies the old stones in autumn with a flush of flame. The troco-ground, with its green turf as smooth as a billiard-table, is just as it was in the days of King James. There in the centre is the iron ring through which the lords and dames drove the heavy wooden troco-balls; and if you go into the garden-hall through that arched corridor you will see the actual balls that they used, and the long poles, with a kind of iron cup at their ends, with which the players pushed them—forerunners of the modern croquet-box that lies beside them.
Under the sunny walls run straight wide borders, where the bees make merry among pinks and lilies, mignonette and gilliflowers, and the walls themselves are tangled with old-fashioned roses and honeysuckles. One double yellow rose tree of prodigious age is kept as the apple of the gardener's eye. Tradition tells that it was brought a hundred years ago from Damascus—a fact which I am quite willing to believe, for the knotted stem tells its own story, and certainly there never was a sweeter rose or one more worthy of coming from the far-famed gardens of the East. Many a thousand blossoms have I picked from its descendants, for it is the ancestor of a hardy race: every sucker of the family grows and thrives in the poorest soil, and covers itself each June with a thick mass of canary-colored blossoms. During the three weeks that the yellow briers were in flower every room in Eversley Rectory was decked out with flat bowls of them on a ground of green ferns, and purple-black pansies mingled with their golden blooms.
Round about the house masses of another yellow flower are planted with no sparing hand—the great St. John's wort. It is pleasant to look upon, but it has another value. Dare I tell it in the nineteenth century, this age of railroads and telegraphs and iron-clads, when space and time are in a fair way to be annihilated, and nothing is so sacred that it may not be questioned, no problem so hard that men may not try to solve it? In the days when Bramshill House was built our forefathers believed firmly in a whole unseen or rarely-seen world around them of fairies, ghosts, spirits and witches. In some out-of-the-way corners in England—even in these days of board schools and competitive examinations, when we are told that King Arthur never existed and that William Tell is a "sun-myth"—some remnants of this belief still linger. In Devonshire folks speak shyly and with bated breath of the "good people;" and even in the year of grace 1879 a Warwickshire laborer was had up before the magistrates for having with a pitchfork half killed a poor old woman whom he declared to be a witch. But be that as it may, in the reign of James I. no one doubted the existence of the spirit-world about us, and on St. John's Eve all its denizens, good and bad, were supposed to wander freely where they would. One only thing they feared, and that was the great St. John's wort. Therefore, all who wished to guard house and home from the unwelcome visitors, who pinched the maids, turned the milk sour and plagued their victims with a thousand impish tricks, planted it freely about their gardens; and thus it is that you see its golden flowers amid their shining rich green leaves and crimson shoots round nearly all old English homes.
Do not laugh at these old fables, gentle reader. When we wander over the green turf and through the wide halls we seem to have opened a door that leads us back into the past out of the turmoil of the nineteenth century. And surely for a moment it can do us no harm to leave our striving, hurrying, anxious modern life, and picture to ourselves the days when our forefathers maybe were ignorant and superstitious, but when they knew how to build and how to fight and how to write—the days when England became "a nest of singing birds."