Let me give a brief sketch of each, taking Denbury first.

Denbury Manor at the end of the eighteenth century was converted and
enlarged into a dower-house for my mother's grandmother, but was
occupied when first I knew it by my great-aunt, her daughter, an old
Miss Margaret Froude. To judge from a portrait done of her in her youth
by Downman, she must have been then a very engaging _ingenue_; but when
I remember her she looked a hundred and fifty. She was, indeed, when she
died very nearly a hundred, and her house and its surroundings now
figure in my recollections as things of the eighteenth century which,
preserved in all their freshness, had hardly been touched by the years
which by that time had followed it. The house, which was of considerable
antiquity, had been, for my great-grandmother's benefit, modernized or
Elizabethanized under the influence of Horace Walpole and Wyat. It was
backed by a rookery of old and enormous elms. It was approached on one
side by a fine avenue of limes, and was otherwise surrounded by gardens
with gray walls or secretive laurel hedges. Here was a water tank in the
form of a Strawberry Hill chapel. Here was a greenhouse unaltered since
the days of George II. Everywhere, though everything was antique, there
were signs of punctilious care, and morning by morning a bevy of female
villagers would be raking the gravel paths and turning them into
weedless silver. The front door, heavy with nails, would be opened by
an aged footman, his cheeks pink like an apple, and his white silk
stockings and his livery always faultless. Within were old Turkey
carpets, glossy, but not worn with use, heavy Chippendale chairs, great
Delf jugs with the monogram of George II on them, a profusion of
Oriental china, and endless bowls of potpourri. On the shelves of
whatnots were books of long-forgotten eighteenth-century plays. In one
of the sitting rooms was a magnificent portrait by Reynolds of Miss
Froude's mother. It represented her playing on a guitar, and on a table
beneath it reposed the guitar itself. Here and there lay one of the
ivory hands with which powdered ladies once condescended to scratch
themselves. There were shining inkstands whose drawers were still
stocked with the wafers used for sealing letters in the days of Lydia
Languish. In another room, called "the little parlor," and commonly used
for breakfast, an old gentleman by Opie smiled from one of the walls,
and saw one thing only which he