A Day at Windsor

IT was on a bright October morning that I took an early train from London to Windsor. No autumnal tints had yet touched the trees, which stood amply robed in vivid green, nor was the grass a blade thinner or a shade paler than it was in summer. The sky was almost cloudless, and of that pale gray - blue which is its brightest color between the narrow seas. I never saw the heaven quite void of clouds in England; and I am not sure that if I had seen it so I should have liked it better. The wind—but there did not seem to be any wind, not even a breeze, only a gentle motion of soft air which stirred just enough to make you conscious of its presence. There was not that glow above and that rich, deep-huted splendor below that make the autumn of New England appear so glorious; but the absence of those bright colors which our year, like a dolphin, takes on as it is dying was more than made up for me by the fullness of life and the freshness of beauty which, when we had left the city behind us, I saw all around me. I admit that I am quite willing to do without any evidences of decay, however brilliant may be its phosphorescence, and that there is no flower which compensates me for the loss of June roses.

In the approach to Windsor there is nothing remarkable; but rural England under a bright sky is always beautiful, and it was after as pleasant an hour as railway traveling will permit that I left the train at the town which clusters around the base of England’s royal castle.

What a little place! It seemed hardly big enough to hold so fat a man as Falstaff. And then it is so small for its age. Think that it should have been there these eight hundred years, and yet have grown no larger! Moreover, there is the surprise of finding in such a very small town such a very big castle. Indeed, it is absurd to say that the castle is at Windsor: it is Windsor that is at the castle. But the smallness of the town, its age, and its apparent incapacity for becoming any larger were all charms in my eyes. It was a new and delightful sensation in England, —the coming upon places that were finished, that were neither great nor growing, and that plainly had no enterprise. It gave rest to a certain stunned and weary feeling which comes upon one in the streets of New York, and in the streets of other places which are daily, with more or less success, doing all they can to be like New York, that dashing, dirty, demirep of cities.

Before going to the castle I walked about the town a little, — not, however, with any Shakespearean purpose. Not in the town, nor in the park, nor in the neighborhood did I make passionate pilgrimage to the scenes of Shakespeare’s only comedy of English life. To what good end or pleasant thought should I have done so? There is not a place nor an object there that Shakespeare has mentioned which is what he saw or had in mind, or which he himself would recognize were he brought back to earth again. Herne’s oak is gone; and if it were not, in what would it differ from any other old oak? And why should I go to Frogmore simply because it is mentioned in The Merry Wives? If places have any beauty or any real charm of association, the sight of them is a source of a great and a pure pleasure. Could I have seen the house that Shakespeare had in mind as Ford’s, or that might have been Ford’s house; could I have seen Mistress Ford or sweet Anne Page, or portraits of the women that stood to Shakespeare as models for those personages — if he had any models, — I would gladly have gone twenty miles afoot to enjoy the sight; but since I could not, since I could see nothing of the sort, not even the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” what need to follow the delusion of an empty name! Even at Stratford there is little that has real association with Shakespeare, except the old Guild Chapel and the Hathaway cottage, which remain much as Shakespeare knew them. The house in Henley Street has been “ restored ” beyond all patient tolerance, and filled with gimcracks and “Shakespearean” vanity. And so I left the places mentioned in The Merry Wives unvisited.

In Windsor itself I found little of interest. The town is not new, but it is modern. Its Elizabethan features have all been improved away. It is chiefly filled with people who live upon the castle, and upon the railway that brings other people to the castle. The glorifying beams of royalty fall upon everything. On a little hut by the river-side I saw a sign, “ All Kinds of Bait. Patronized by the Royal Family;” and I had some comfort in picturing to myself the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of Edinburgh and Connaught going there for worms and minnows when they went out fishing on half holidays, —although, poor fellows, I fear they never had the true boyish pleasure of carrying their worms, not exactly, like Mr. Punch’s boy, in their mouths, but in boxes in their own pockets, and of putting them on the hooks themselves, and then of taking home a good catch of fish for the royal breakfast-table. Who would be a prince, to have his hook baited by an attendant, and his gun loaded by a gamekeeper! In pleasure dignity dulls the edge of enjoyment. But nevertheless a bait-house patronized by the royal family was a thing to see.

In a little public-house in a by-street I saw in the window a card: “ Bean Feasts and Parties Supplied.” And this I hailed as evidence that pork and beans came into New England with the Mayflower, quite as trustworthy, to say the least, as that on which some noble families are said to have come into Old England with the Conqueror. And I was also glad to see in it evidence that the bean-eaters had their little merrymakings and picnickings, not unlike those festivals which produce here a dreadful variety of iced-cream and consequent stomachic derangements for Sundayschool children.

In the course of my stroll I came upon a house which had recently been burned, the ruins of which stood just as they had been left by the fire. The house had not been wholly destroyed, and the skeleton still held together. It seemed to have been built some forty or fifty years ago.

I was surprised at the flimsiness of its construction. The bricks were poor and the mortar was bad; the beams were out of proportion, small, and badly joined; the tenon and mortise work was not only clumsy, but weak and insufficient. A house so built may be found anywhere; and I should not mention this but as the occasion of remarking that I found the same inferior builder’s work wherever I went in England. According to my observation. modern English houses, unless they are built with special care and unusual expense, are very slightly put together, with bad materials and poor workmanship. It is the custom there to put up the shells of houses, usually three or four together, and to leave them to he finished according to the wishes of an intending tenant or purchaser. They are called “carcasses.” I examined many of these without finding one even tolerably well built. The walls brought to mind the scoff of Tobiah the Ammonite against the newly rebuilt wall of Jerusalem: “ If a fox go up he shall break down their stone wall.” The mortar, although it had been set for years, would crumble under the touch of my stick, even of my thumb nail. And walls of the modern-built villa houses that I visited were rarely more substantial, while the joiner’s work was both flimsy and coarse. I also remarked that where recent additions had been made to the height of garden walls the mortar in the new part, although in general it was plainly ten or twenty, or even thirty, years old, was more like mud than like mortar. Indeed, I did not see in England, in a new private building of moderate pretensions, any mortar worthy of the name. This attracted my attention, I need hardly say, because of the notion generally prevailing, and sedulously encouraged by British writers, that all English work is distinguished from other work of its kind by excellence of material and thoroughness of workmanship; that although it might not have elegance it was sure to be substantial. I did not find it so. In this respect, in many ways, I was disappointed. That such was once the character of the work of English artisans and manufacturers I believe is not to be disputed; but during the last fifty years this one glory of England seems to have departed.

Visitors to Windsor Castle are required to register their names in a book, when they receive tickets, without which they cannot pass the gate. No fee is expected or allowed to be taken for this preliminary process, which is performed at a tittle shop in the principal street of the town. I offered a half crown to the respectable and cheerful dame who thus equipped me; but she told me, with a smile, that she could take nothing, but that she had guide-books which she could sell me. Whereupon I whipped her particular devil around her particular stump, to her entire satisfaction. As to her books, they were naught, as such book are most commonly. While I was doing this it occurred to me that I wanted some ginger-pop, a potation which I had not yet tasted, and which I would by no means have left England without enjoying. For in my boyish days I had been made thirsty by reading of the revelings of English boys in this exhilarating drink, just as I had been made hungry by reading in Scott’s novels of knights and cavaliers devouring venison pasties. I asked for some ginger-pop. But the lady replied with some dignity that she did not keep it, adding kindly and with some condescension that 1 might get it at a little shop down the street. Hereupon a cheery young voice broke out, “ I ’ll show you, sir, where you can get some pop.” I turned, and saw a lad some twelve or fourteen years old, and, thanking him, asked him if the pop would be good. He assured me that it would, adding by way of proof, “ All the fellows of our school go there.” Momentarily forgetful, I asked. What school? “ Why, Eton, of course,” he replied. We went off together, and soon pledged each other in the fizzing fluid, which, to my great, disappointment, 1 found to be nothing more than poor soda-water flavored with poor ginger syrup. But I was well recompensed for this disillusion My companion’s views upon the subject of gingerpop were different from mine, and he beamed and expanded under its influence. I told him that I had come to see the castle, and asked him some questions about it. Of course he knew Windsor through and through, and after we had chatted awhile he offered to go with me and be my guide.

We set off immediately, and at the castle we became part of a group or squad of visitors who were about to make the round of the state apartments. For here, as at other great show places, it is the custom for an attendant to start upon a tour either at certain intervals, or when visitors to the number of a dozen to a score have assembled. I shall not be go superfluous as to give any description of these apartments, which did not impress me either with their magnificence or their good taste. I expected both; I would have been satisfied with one; I found neither. There was an absence of grandeur and stateliness in proportion and in arrangement, a lack both of splendor and of elegance in decoration, which surprised me. Nor was there any impression of antiquity in keeping with the age of this venerable palace and fortress. Two of the apartments were of great interest,—the Vandyke room and St. George’s Hall. The Vandyke room is filled with portraits by that master-painter of gentlemen and gentlewomen. Of the twenty-two canvases one half are portraits of Charles I. or of his family. There are three of Charles himself; of Henrietta Maria* four, besides that in the family group. One wearies a lit tle of Charles’s handsome, high-bred, melancholy face, with its peaked beard dividing the singularly elegant, but certainly most unmanly, Vandyke collar. And after all, notwithstanding Charles’s beauty and his ah’ of refinement, he had not a kingly look. His face lacked strength. The Earl of Strafford, whose portrait is perhaps the greatest head that Vandyke ever painted, looked far more kingly; and, with all Strafford’s faults, he was more kingly than his master. The most interesting of the other and not royal portraits are those of Tom Killigrew, of Care w, and of Vandyke himself.

St. George’s Hall is interesting from the fact that it has upon its walls and its ceiling the arms and the names of all the knights of the Garter who have been installed since the foundation of the order. The general effect is that of a rich series of heraldic mosaics. As to the knights, there is, as Sir Pertinax Macsycophant might say, “ sic an admeexture.” Not that there was a “ Jew and a beeshop,”—at least there was no Jew’s name yet visible when I was there in 1876; but the admixture is of men of mark and distinction with men who were merely the commonplace sons of commonplace fathers, inheritors of high rank and great estates, who but for their inheritance would never have been heard of beyond the bounds of their own parishes, and who as simple gentlemen would have had no claim to admiration and little to respect. And yet the Garter is the great prize of life in England. To win it men will peril body and soul, although it is the emptiest of all distinctions. For a knight of the Most Noble Order, except by his star and his garter, does not differ in virtue of his knighthood from any other human mortal. A peerage brings station and power and privilege and ennobling duty and opportunity; but the Garter and the Golden Fleece and the Black Eagle, — what are they? Can any one tell what good they do the man who wears them, or of what merit they are the sign ? They are not like the Victoria Cross, or the Order of Merit, or even like that much-cheapened distinction the Legion of Honor, tokens of courage, or of ability, or of character. But a knight of the Garter is one of a body of not more than some fifty men (originally but twenty-five), who have the sovereign for their chief and foreign kings and princes among their number; and therefore it is the most coveted distinction in Europe, although it means nothing, and the order does nothing. This hall of the order of St. George is two hundred feet long, but as it is only thirty-four feet wide its effect is not one of grandeur; on the contrary, it seems like a decorated passage-way to some really grand apartment.

The Waterloo Chamber, although not very spacious considering that it is one of the principal state apartments in the principal palace of the British sovereign, is yet a noble room. It is hung with some thirty or forty portraits, nearly all at full length, of distinguished personages who were connected in some way with the great battle which ended Napoleon’s career. Most of these portraits are by Sir Thomas Lawrence. As one looks around it, the old exclamation, “ My stars and garters ! ” (which was still heard in New England thirty years ago), is brought forcibly to mind. Such an exhibition of starred coats and gartered legs, and of robes and of ermine and of human upholstery in general, with faces appended thereto in Lawrence’s weak, pretty style, is not to be found elsewhere. It is amusing to see that whatever the figures of the men may be, which are hidden by the velvet and the fur, their legs are all alike. Lawrence evidently had one pair as models, and furnished them to all his sitters with impartial pencil.

It was more amusing to see the awful admiration with which these and other magnificences were regarded by the visitors, who were all, with the single exception of myself, British sight-seers of the middle and lower-middle classes, out on a holiday. Of the Vandykes they took little notice; they were more disposed to admire the vast inanities of Verrio and Zuccarelli in the audience chamber and the drawing-room. But these robed and Jeweled full-length portraits of kings and princes and dukes and earls, whose names they knew, were to them manifestly glimpses of glory. They were also much interested in furniture, gilded chairs and tables and vases, and the like.

My Eton boy kept near me, but he had found two or three young companions, and when he was not playing goodnatured cicerone to me (and he showed intelligence and good taste in what he said) he chatted with them. I saw that our official attendant fretted at this, particularly when the lad spoke to me. He was a consequential man, more like one of John Leech’s butlers than any real butler that I saw in England. His squat figure was carefully dressed in black; his shoes were polished to an obtrusive brightness, so that they looked like large lumps of authracite coal; and he shone at both ends, for he must have had an ounce of highly perfumed oil upon his straight black hair, which was coaxed into the semblance of a curl above each ear. He delivered himself of his explanations with pompous dignity. At last, on one occasion, when my young companion had spoken some what, eagerly to me, and had then turned to his fellows, and their tongues disturbed the almost awful hush with which the small crowd of Philistines listened to his descriptions, the man stopped short in the midst of an harangue, and, wheeling about upon my Eton guide, broke out, “ Wot har you a-talkin’ about? Wot do you know about hanythink in the Castle? Will you by quiet wen hl’m a-talkin’! ’ Ow can the ladies and gentlemen hundersland the castle if they can’t ’ear me speak? ” The boy held his peace, of course; but as soon as the man turned round again, looked up at me with a most impenitent wink, and thrust his tongue into his cheek with an expression that, if his rebuker had seen it, would have made him choke with suppressed wrath.

The weary round of the state apartments having been finished, I went to St. George’s Chapel, which, although worth seeing, seemed to me less so than any church of note that I visited in England. The monument to the Princess Charlotte is one of those elaborate exhibitions of bad taste which were put up at great expense in England at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. Indeed, I did not see in any church in the country a modern monument which was well designed or really beautiful. The modern monuments in Westminster Abbey are mostly monstrosities in marble.

The noble round tower of Windsor Castle is its chief beauty. It dominates and harmonizes all the other architectural features of the pile. It is the round tower that makes Windsor Castle imposing. We all know Windsor by that tower, which sits like a great crown upon the castle-palace of the British sovereigns. Up the hundred stone steps of this tower I went with my young Eton friend; and if the steps had been a thousand I should have been well repaid for the ascent by the sight that greeted me on all sides, as I looked off from the battlements. The guide-books say that when the atmosphere is unclouded twelve counties, Middlesex, Hertford, Essex, Oxford, Wilts, Kent, Hants, Bedford, Sussex, Berks, Bucks, and Surrey, may be seen from this elevation. I must then have seen my full dozen; for although there were clouds, they were few and light, and themselves so beautiful that I would not have given the sight of them for the sight of six more counties; and the day was bright and clear with a soft, golden clearness. Except from Richmond Hill, off which I looked on such another day, I had no sight of English land that was to be compared with this in its beauty and in its peculiarly English character. It was picturesque, but it had no striking features. Its charm was, as I have remarked before, upon other occasions, in the blending of man’s work with nature’s; in the alternation of the noble and the simple; in the grand harmony of things beautiful in themselves, yet not very striking if seen alone, like the rich blending of simple themes in great orchestral music. It was a grand symphony in form and color. For it seemed, like a symphony, to have been constructed, yet with such art that the succession and relation of its beauties seemed also perfectly natural. To have disturbed their order, or to have regarded one without regarding the others also, would have been destructive of its highest charm, — that of the extension and continuity of varied, self-developed beauty. I wandered around the great circle of the parapet, and leaning into the golden-tinted air drank in delight that filled me with a gentle happiness.

But I was not allowed to muse in solitude. Soon a warder came up to me, telescope in hand, and began his official function. He called my attention to this great house and to the other, seeming to think that the chief pleasure in looking from Windsor Castle consisted in seeing the seat of this or of that nobleman. I did not take his prying telescope, and after a word or two walked away and changed my point of view. Soon he followed me, and began again his verbal catalogue and index, and again offered me his brazen tube. Annoyed by his persistence, and wishing at once to be left alone and not to offend him in the performance of his office, as the easiest way of accomplishing my double purpose I listened to him a moment, took the telescope, and sweeping the horizon slowly with it, handed it back to him with thanks and the customary shilling. He took the telescope, of course, but to my surprise he refused the shilling.¹ His manner was very respectful, but equally decided. Fearing that he might fasten himself upon me as a gratuitous guide, I pressed the coin upon him on the ground that I had used his telescope. “ No, indeed, sir, you did n’t,” he replied, with civil and even deferential manner. “ I saw you did n’t, and I’ve done nothing for the tip.” I yielded, and was moving away again, when, after looking at me a moment, he said, “ I beg your pardon, but I think you must be an American gentleman. I should n’t have thought it, if you had n’t been so suspicious. American gentlemen are always so suspicious.”

The man’s respectful but outspoken manner pleased me. I was a little puzzled by his epithet, but apprehended him in a moment. He had no conception of the feeling which made me desire to be alone, and supposed that I regarded him as a sort of impostor, who for the sake of my shilling professed to show me what he did not know himself. For the rest, — ’ow was I to hunderstand the castle if I did n't ’ear him speak? Then I put myself into his hands, and let him show me his landscape and his country seats; and in the course of our talk I learned from him that Americans were more apt than Englishmen to decline his offices. This he thought was because they were so sharp, “ bein’ so accustomed, you see, sir, to be taken in at ’ome.” That was richly worth the shilling, which I offered him again, and which he now took thankfully.

My nativity had been detected by a stranger only once before ; and that was by a tailor, who spoke of it casually as, soon after my arrival, I was trying on a water-proof overcoat at a shop in Regent Street. I asked him how he knew it. He smiled, and said, pointing to my coat, “ I knew that coat, sir, was never made in England.” He was right; and I should have known it myself if I had seen the coat upon another man, although it was cut after a London pattern, and was made of English cloth by an English tailor. This stamp of nationality in handiwork is universally borne. Why it is so seems almost unaccountable. But a book, for example, bound in New York or at Riverside by an English binder, with English tools and English materials, after an English pattern carefully copied, can be distinguished from a London-bound book almost at a glance by an observant book-lover. It may be as well bound, or better, but it will not be the same. So a London-made watchcase copied here line lor line, and in tint of metal to a shade, will be easily distinguishable from the original, even although the pattern is “ engine-turned” and worked by a machine in both cases. The critic would not perhaps find a ready reason for his discrimination, and might find it impossible to give one; but none the less he would be safe in making it.

Just as I was turning from my warder, he said, “ If you like old churches, sir, yonder’s one that’s one of the three or four oldest in the kingdom, they say,— St. Andrew’s of Clure;” and he pointed off to a little spire that shot up from among some trees and hay-stacks two or three miles off. This was welcome news; and after a word or two with him on the subject, I sought and found my Eton boy, and asked him if he knew the way to that little church. “ To be sure,” he said, mentioning the name. “ I ’ve been there many a time. Would you like to go? We need n’t go by the road; I know paths through the fields.” We set off without more words. He took me down through by-streets, and then through workshops and stables, and at last brought me out upon a broad, low meadow; and then we followed by-paths and lanes. And here, from this out-of-the-way place, I got a view of the castle which surpassed in grandeur and in noble picturesqueness all views of it that I had seen before, either with my own eyes or in prints and pictures. The sky line was much finer, the whole pile had much more dignity, and the long, level foreground over which I looked stretched out directly to the base of the mound out of which that majestic growth of stone seems to spring.

As we walked, the lad, upon a little leading, told me about himself. He was a foundation scholar. His family had been a wealthy county family, but had decayed and become poor,—by means,

I suspect, from what dropped casually with his story, of a scampish father and grandfather. But his friends had interest enough to get him a foundation scholarship at Eton, where he had been two years. But the poor fellow had not prospered ; for he confessed to me that he had been plucked twice. Moreover, he told me how hard a life he led among the sons of noblemen and rich gentlemen who filled the school; how they scorned him and scoffed him, and at best slighted him, and took no more notice of him “ than if he had been a puppy dog.” I did not tell him, but I saw that the reason of this treatment was not only his being on the foundation, as he said, but his being neither clever nor strong. He was intelligent enough, and not a weakling; but he had been plucked twice, and I saw that he would not have counted for much at foot-ball or at cricket. He lacked both nervous energy and strength of fibre; and this in a foundation boy who was nothing at his books of course made him a nonentity at such a school as Eton, where, most of all places in England, the traditionary creed is held that

But he was a good-hearted fellow, and with some independence, as I found ; for he would take no tip from me, and had declined, as we came through the town from the castle, to have luncheon, suspecting, as I saw plainly, that I proposed it on his account. Poor, weak, sensitive soul! — sure not to succeed in life; able neither to take nor to keep, and ashamed to receive, yet far more worthy of respect than many who get both gain and glory.

After a pleasant walk we came out close by the little church, which stood almost literally among the hay-stacks, and which might have been hidden entirely from view, except its spire, by any one of many hay-stacks that I have seen in Pennsylvania; for it was no larger than a country school-house. But outside and inside it was a little jewel, of quaintest design, if design could be asserted of what bore the marks of different hands and different periods, — Saxon, Norman, and Early English. Part of it is said to have been built in the seventh century. It stood in its churchyard almost like a summer-house in a garden. It was composed of two parts, one much longer than the other. Its walls were of chalk and flint, and its roof was of flat, red tiles. It had alow, square tower, Very heavily buttressed at the angles, from which rose, with a curved base, a small, sharp spire. The little porch at the side showed its rafters, as the whole church did; those of the porch were like an A. Although so small, it had a nave and side aisles, and little clear-story windows, the sills of which almost rested upon round arches supported by rude pillars. It had a pretty carved altarpiece; and there were the old high pews, —actually old, but comparatively very new; for at least one part of the church had been built centuries before pews and Protestantism came in together. It was by far the prettiest country church that I saw in England, and much the most interesting, notwithstanding the superior age claimed for St. Martin’s at Canterbury and the associations of the Hospital church at Harbledown. Yet upon after-inquiry among those of my friends who had been educated at Eton, I did not find one who had seen St. Andrew’s of Clure, although he had been within an hour’s easy walk of it for three years.

As I entered the church, there appeared at the porch, I know not how, as if she had come up out of a vault, an old woman, who smiled and courtesied and gave me good-day as I went in. She wore a cap, a folded kerchief, and an apron, all as neat as wax and as white as snow. I saw, of course, that the little place was her show; but how she managed to be there as I came in, the queen’s head upon a shilling only knows; for there cannot be a visitor a day to this little place. I expected to hear her soon whining beside me; but no, she remained quietly at the porch, while I sauntered about the church until I got my fill of it; nor did she offer to speak to me until I called her to me and asked a question. She answered in so sweet a voice and with so pleasant a manner that she won my heart on the spot; but it had been half won, as I encountered her, by her smile, her cap, her kerchief, and her apron. She showed me the little that there was to be shown, and told me the little that there was to be told, about the church, which for its age was very bare of legend and of monument. As I passed out I observed the font close by the porch, — a large, low, dark-colored bath of stone, half filled with water. Around the edge, which was a full span deep, was arranged a garland of roses, the most beautiful, I think, that I ever saw. They were white and red and yellow, and their perfume filled the whole of the quaint old shrine; for the little church was hardly more. The old woman, seeing my admiration of them, told me that the rector’s daughters had put them there “ because to-day was St. Michael’s and hall hangels. ” She dropped a little courtesy as she said it; and if St. Michael and all the other angels were not pleased with her simple obeisance, they must be harder to propitiate than I believe they are.

We went out into the church-yard, which had as much beauty as such a place can have, — more than any other that I ever saw. It was full of small dark evergreens (the Irish yew), which shot up, pointed like spires, from the emerald grass, the flowers, and the old head-stones. Although the place was so small and so rustic, there were others than “ the rude forefathers of the hamlet” buried there. And as I went about among the stones the old woman, whom I kept near me by constant questions, that I might enjoy the pleasure of her speech, stooped to some planks which I had thought were the temporary cover of a new and unfilled grave, and removing one of them showed me a large and handsome vault. It was of white marble, finely finished, and had slabs for two coffins. She told me that a Colonel was building it for himself and for his wife; and she pointed out to me with evident pride its elegance and costliness. “ See, sir,” she said, “ what a beautiful resting-place the Colonel is building for himself, and for his lady too, when it pleases God to call them. Could there be anything finer ? See, sir, white marble and polished that the porch of your own house could n’t be finer. [No, indeed, good soul; there you are nearer right than you seem to think.] It must be such a consolation to them, sir.” And she spoke quite as if she thought that the Colonel and his “lady” ought to be very thankful, when it pleased God to call them, to be laid away in so grand and elegant a place.

I left her smiling and court eseying, and walked back to Windsor with my young Eton friend. I have since heard that she herself lies now in the church-yard; and although there will be no marble around or above her humble coffin, I have no doubt that she sleeps as well as if she lay in the tomb that she regarded as so inviting. Peace be with her; for she had a gentle way, a sweet voice, and she did not speak unbidden.

We crossed the Thames, going thus from Windsor to Eton, and from Berkshire into Bucks; but we were not out of one until we were in the other, and indeed it seemed to me as if, excepting the castle, both places-could be covered with a large blanket. In this is one of the charms of England, and I believe of other European countries,—that in small towns which have always been small yon may find buildings, like Windsor Castle and Eton College, which have always been large; and the cultivated fields and the green meadows come close up to the walls or to the houses. Eton is a very small place, but is full of houses in which it must be a delight to live, so indicative are their outsides of comfort and refinement, and, not least, of reserve. And this expression of reserve, which pertains more or less to the houses in all small towns in England, is much helped in all by the winding, irregular streets. You cannot stand and look down a row of houses a quarter of a mile long as if you were inspecting a file of soldiers.

It was now long after noon, and I saw in a field an Eton game of foot-ball. It was played with spirit, but with less dash than I had been led to expect. At another time, however, there may have been more. Apart from their uniforms, the players could not have been distinguished from the same number of Yankee boys, of like condition in life, engaged in the same sport. I also met a large party of “ old boys,” as they came up, in their uniforms, from a cricket match. A lathier lot of young fellows I never saw. Not that they were either weak looking or unhealthy; but they were not at all what the writings of English critics had led me to expect. Not one was robust; only one had color; and there was not a curling auburn head among them. I saw Éton boys by scores, and found them neither ruddy nor plump,

but, like most other boys between twelve and twenty, rather pale and slender. The full-dress Eton costume is a ridiculous one. It is a short jacket or roundabout, with a very broad turn-over shirt collar, and a chimney-pot hat. The combination is grotesque; and it is made more so by the solemnity of most of the young chaps when they have it on.

Hunger drove me and my young companion into a restaurant, and I shall never forget the looks of a little Eton prig who entered as we were sitting, and took a place over against us. He kept on his preposterous hat, gave his order as if it were for his own capital execution, and ate his cakes and drank his chocolate as if that event were to take place at the conclusion of his repast. My poor fellow was not one tenth part, so dignified, although he was, I am sure, a hundred times more agreeable. And when the time came for us to part, and I thanked him for his company, he stood up and made me a bow, and said, “ I have had a very pleasant day, sir, and I hope you have.” We went out and shook hands, and he turned toward the school, and I across the Thames toward Windsor. I should be glad to know that he was no longer snubbed, or worse, and that lie was not plucked at his next examination. I was soon in the train, and as we steamed away towards London, although it was only five o’clock in the afternoon, I saw the mist rising and lying in level bars across the trees some six or eight feet above the ground. It was so dense that it was plainly visible at a distance of not more than one hundred yards, —plain enough for me to make a memorandum sketch of it. But this seems to breed no malaria. The tertian ague of our forefathers has departed from England. Did it come over here with pork and beans and some other English blessings in the May flower?

Richard Grant White.