, strictly an aristocratic pleasure," I assented,
laughing.

So we came to Holland House. Its wide fields of sprouting corn, its
woods and pastures and orchards in blossom, were smiling that morning,
as though Leviathan, the town, were not rolling onward to swallow
them. Lord Holland had bought the place from the Warwicks, with all
its associations and memories. The capped towers and quaint facades and
projecting windows were plain to be seen from where we halted in the
shaded park, and to the south was that Kensington Road we had left, over
which all the glory and royalty of England at one time or another had
rolled. Under these majestic oaks and cedars Cromwell and Ireton had
stood while the beaten Royalists lashed their horses on to Brentford.
Nor did I forget that the renowned Addison had lived here after his
unhappy marriage with Lady Warwick, and had often ridden hence to
Button's Coffee House in town, where my grandfather had had his dinner
with Dean Swift.

We sat gazing at the building, which was bathed in the early sun, at the
deer and sheep grazing in the park, at the changing colours of the young
leaves as the breeze swayed them. The market wagons had almost ceased
now, and there was little to break the stillness.

"You love the place?" I said.

He started, as though I had awakened him out of a sleep. And he was no
longer the Fox of the clubs, the cynical, the reckless. He was no longer
the best-dressed man in St. James's Street, or the aggressive youngster
of St. Stephen's.

"Love it!" he cried. "Ay, Richard, and few guess how well. You will not
laugh when I tell you that my happiest days have been passed here, when
I was but a chit, in the long room where Addison used to walk up and
down composing his Spectators: or trotting after my father through these
woods and gardens. A kinder parent does not breathe than he. Well
I remember how he tossed me in his arms under that tree when I had
thrashed another lad for speaking ill of him. He called me his knight.
In all my life he has never broken faith with me. When they were
blasting down a wall where those palings now stand, he promised me I
should see it done, and had it rebuilt and blown down again because I
had missed the sight. All he ever exacted of me was that I should treat
him as an elder brother. He had his own notion of the world I was going
into, and prepared me accordingly. He took me from Eton to Spa, where I
learned gaming instead of Greek, a