,
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, w