be dug for the table at Christmas. Another house was filled or festooned with cucumbers, trained up like grape-vines, and hanging their long green pendants with a relishing savour which would have delighted Sarah Gamp to ecstasy. Strawberries in blossom had a house to themselves. French beans were in pod, and peas in blow for New Year's Day. About two hundred pine-apple plants were in fruit at different stages, larger and better in flavour than those which Nature produces by herself in the West Indies. In the grape-walks we saw one set of vines which averaged a growth of twenty feet from the last of October, or within the space of five weeks. The head gardener has a force of about thirty-five men and boys in constant employment, whose aggregate wages amount to about £100 a month. We learned that the whole establishment, including house and conservatories, consume yearly £2,000 worth of coal. The kitchen-garden contains about thirteen acres. The park embracing or surrounding these gardens is of vast extent and grandly wooded. One old oak looks just like old England in its trunk and branches and in all the stoutness of its huge vitality. So until it falls or is sawn in sunder, one cannot read the record of its centuries, but it probably was a thrifty little tree before the Norman Conquest.
This little sequestered world of beauty takes a
