r the hamlet elms; far beyond, I
see low wolds, streaked and dappled by copse and wood; far to the south,
I see the towers and spires of Cambridge, as of some spiritual city--the
smoke rises over it on still days, hanging like a cloud; to the east lie
the dark pine-woods of Suffolk, to the north an interminable fen;
but not only is it that one sees a vast extent of sky, with great
cloud-battalions crowding up from the south, but all the colour of the
landscape is crowded into a narrow belt to the eye, which gives it an
intensity of emerald hue that I have seen nowhere else in the world.
There is a sense of deep peace about it all, the herb of the field just
rising in its place over the wide acres; the air is touched with a lazy
fragrance, as of hidden flowers; and there is a sense, too, of silent
and remote lives, of men that glide quietly to and fro in the great
pastures, going quietly about their work in a leisurely calm. In the
winter it is fairer still, if one has a taste for austerity. The trees
are leafless now; and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most
delicate and spare tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing bent,
the pale stubble, the rich plough-land, all blending into a subdued
colour; and then, as the day declines and the plain is rimmed with a
frosty mist, the smouldering glow of the orange sunset begins to burn
clear on the horizon, the grey laminated clouds becoming ridged with
gold and purple, till the whole fades, like a shoaling sea, into the
purest green, while the cloud-banks grow black and ominous, and far-off
lights twinkle like stars in solitary farms.

Of the house itself, exteriorly, perhaps the less said the better; it
was built by an earl, to whom the estate belonged, as a shooting-box. I
have often thought that it must have been ordered from the Army and
Navy Stores. It is of yellow brick, blue-slated, and there has been a
pathetic feeling after giving it a meanly Gothic air; it is ill-placed,
shut in by trees, approached only by a very dilapidated farm-road; and
the worst of it is that a curious and picturesque house was destroyed to
build it. It stands in what was once a very pretty and charming little
park, with an ancient avenue of pollard trees, lime and elm. You can see
the old terraces of the Hall, the mounds of ruins, the fish-ponds, the
grass-grown pleasance. It is pleasantly timbered, and I have an orchard
of honest fruit-trees of my own. First of all I expect it was a