Mrs. A. T. Thomson
Published: 1975
Total Pages: 632
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAP. III. HAMPTON COURT, PAST AND PRESENT. My chronicle of Ham House is ended. Not so, however, my rambles, and if you please, I will continue my researches in that neighbourhood, so rich in its tradi-' tions, its old houses, and its haunts of the gay, the learned, and the brave. I had taken up my abode in a spot quite congenial to the taste of pne who, like myself, is a worshipper in imagination of strong-holds, and embattled towers, and has a weakness for palaces, but prefers living in a cottage. Alas! my cottage is a villa now. Those low ivy-mantled walls have been raised and stuccoed. The latticed windows, under which the swallow built, have been made into respectable croisees?the elm tree which shaded the lawn has a china-bottomed seat beneath it? ponds have been filled up with sanitary care, ? and a smart footman appears at the gate, which was in my time a wicket, and which in my time always stood open, or (I was going to say), opened of its own accord. It was July: the mowing grass was cut, I remember, and lay in rows on the upland meadow beyond the lawn, and the white lilac tree that used to look like an apparition in the moonshine had shed its delicateHAMPTON COURT, PAST AND PRESENT. 59 flowers on the turf below, into the dell, where, in my bed of bog-plants, rhododendrons were then flowering. A cool evening and the plashing of the ferryman's oar tempted me to cross from the low-browed inn at Thames Ditton, to the opposite side of the river. I write of a period some twenty years ago, when the noted Swan was the respectable ale-house of the village, a place of retreat for needy wits in search of cheap country air; more of a ferryhouse than even of an alehouse, or scarcely pretending, indeed, to that degree; a convenient resort, not so much for the serv...
