[Illustration: STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH EAST.]

There's General my Lady Castlecomer, and General my Lady Dowager Ferris!
Why, do you think I can extract more out of them than you can out of
Hawley or Honeywood? Your old women dress, go to the Duke's levée, see
that the soldiers cock their hats right, sleep after dinner, and soak
with their led-captains till bed-time, and tell a thousand lies of what
they never did in their youth. Change hats for head-clothes, the rounds
for visits, and led-captains for toad-eaters, and the life is the very
same. In short, these are the people I live in the midst of, though not
with; and it is for want of more important histories that I have wrote
to you seldom; not, I give you my word, from the least negligence. My
present and sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great
progress and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now
and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more
than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the
deliberation with which trees grow, is extremely inconvenient to my
natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are
come to so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded that a hundred
and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and
fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip roots.[1] I have even
begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity
in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the
great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers--one of the
improvements which Mrs. Kerwood wondered Mr. Hedges would not make at
his country-house, but which was not then quite so common as it will be.
I shall talk of a secret for roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of
hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be
brought up to table; and for this secret, the Duke of Newcastle's