He would stroll about the pleasant garden with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place,--perhaps take you to his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the chief view of all.

A really charming outlook, in fine weather.

Close at hand, wide sweep of flowery leafy gardens, their few houses mostly hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy umbrage, flowed gloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating plain-country, rich in all charms of field and town.

Waving blooming country of the brightest green; dotted all over with handsome villas, handsome groves; crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible or heard only as a musical hum: and behind all swam, under olive-tinted haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all.

Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward,--southward, and so draping with the city-smoke not you but the city.