the
aqueduct supplies great fountains, and runs down into huge oblong
basins in the terraced gardens, one below the other, each surrounded by
a broad pavement of marble between the water and the flower-beds. The
waste surplus finally escapes through an artificial grotto, some thirty
yards long, into a stream, flowing down through the park to the meadows
beyond, and thence to the distant river. The buildings were extended a
little and greatly altered more than two hundred years ago, in the time
of Charles II., but since then little has been done to improve them,
though they have been kept in fairly good repair, according to our
fortunes.

In the gardens there are terraces and huge hedges of box and evergreen,
some of which used to be clipped into shapes of animals, in the Italian
style. I can remember when I was a lad how I used to try to make out
what the trees were cut to represent, and how I used to appeal for
explanations to Judith, my Welsh nurse. She dealt in a strange
mythology of her own, and peopled the gardens with griffins, dragons,
good genii and bad, and filled my mind with them at the same time. My
nursery window afforded a view of the great fountains at the head of
the upper basin, and on moonlight nights the Welshwoman would hold me
up to the glass and bid me look at the mist and spray rising into
mysterious shapes, moving mystically in the white light like living
things.

"It's the Woman of the Water," she used to say; and sometimes she would
threaten that if I did not go to sleep the Woman of the Water would
steal up to the high window and carry me away in her wet arms.

[Illustration: F. Hopkinson Smith]

The place was gloomy. The broad basins of water and the tall evergreen
hedges gave it a funereal look, and the damp-stained marble causeways
by the pools might have been made of tombstones. The gray and
weather-beaten walls and towers without, the dark and massively
furnished rooms within, the deep, mysterious recesses and the heavy
curtains, all affected my spirits. I was silent and sad from my
childhood. There was a great clock tower above, from which the hours
rang dismally during the day, and tolled like a knell in the dead of
night. There was no light nor life in the house, for my mother was a
helpless invalid, and my father had grown melancholy in his long task
of caring for her. He was a thin, dark man, with sad eyes; kind, I
think, but silent and unhappy. Next to my mother, I