[Illustration: COWDRAY.]

The park is a beautiful pleasaunce for the inhabitants of Midhurst;
thickly carpeted with bracken and heather and broken by many
picturesque knolls and hollows. The famous burned and ruined mansion
lies on the west, close to the town and river. This beautiful old house
was destroyed in 1793 through the carelessness of some workmen employed
in repairing the woodwork of some of the upper rooms. Within a month of
the calamity the last of the Montagues, a young man of 22, was drowned
while shooting the falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen. These tragic
happenings were supposed to fulfil a curse of the last monk of Battle
pronounced against Sir Anthony Browne when he took possession of the
Abbey. "Thy line shall end by fire and water and utterly perish."

The following is a contemporary account of the tragedy: "Lord Montague
was engaged to the eldest daughter of Mr. Coutts (the present Countess
of Guildford) and, with a view to his marriage on his return to
England, the mansion house had been for several months undergoing a
complete repair and fitting up. The whole was completed on the day
preceding the night on which it was consumed, and the steward had been
employed during the afternoon in writing the noble owner an account of
its completion. This letter reached his hands. On the following day the
steward wrote another letter announcing its destruction: but in his
hurry of spirits, he directed it to Lausanne instead of Lucerne, by
which accident it was two days longer in its passage to his lordship's
place of abode than it otherwise would have been. Had it not been for
that fatal delay, in all human probability this noble family would not
have had to deplore the double misfortune by which its name and honours
have become extinguished; for the letter arrived at his lordship's