especially remember a picturesque old gabled house at a turnpike-gate,
and, altogether, the wayside scenery had an aspect of old-fashioned
English life; but there was nothing very memorable till we reached
Woodstock, and stopped to water our horses at the Black Bear. This
neighborhood is called New Woodstock, but has by no means the brand-new
appearance of an American town, being a large village of stone houses,
most of them pretty well time-worn and weather-stained. The Black Bear
is an ancient inn, large and respectable, with balustraded staircases,
and intricate passages and corridors, and queer old pictures and
engravings hanging in the entries and apartments. We ordered a lunch
(the most delightful of English institutions, next to dinner) to be
ready against our return, and then resumed our drive to Blenheim.

The park-gate of Blenheim stands close to the end of the village-street
of Woodstock. Immediately on passing through its portals, we saw the
stately palace in the distance, but made a wide circuit of the park
before approaching it. This noble park contains three thousand acres of
land, and is fourteen miles in circumference. Having been, in part,
a royal domain before it was granted to the Marlborough family, it
contains many trees of unsurpassed antiquity, and has doubtless been the
haunt of game and deer for centuries. We saw pheasants in abundance,
feeding in the open lawns and glades; and the stags tossed their antlers
and bounded away, not affrighted, but only shy and gamesome, as we
drove by. It is a magnificent pleasure-ground, not too tamely kept, nor
rigidly subjected within rule, but vast enough to have lapsed back into
Nature again, after all the pains that the landscape-gardeners of
Queen Anne's time bestowed on it, when the domain of Blenheim was
scientifically laid out. The great, knotted, slanting trunks of the old
oaks do not now look as if man had much intermeddled with their growth
and postures. The trees of later date, that were set out in the Great