house in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough
Common, four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and
heather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of
breathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of
seven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak,
twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its
stones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its
site. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The
westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little
hall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork
in blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to
the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first
sketched the plan of _Robert Elsmere_ for my sister Julia Huxley, and
where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of
the back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's
school-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that
look in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and
the nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young
Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as
it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium,
surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people
have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or
Atreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always
poisoning the present.

As to Borough Farm--now the head-quarters of the vast camp which
stretches to Hindhead--it stood then in an unspoiled wilderness of
common and wood, approached only by what we called "the sandy track"
from the main Portsmouth Road, with no neighbors for miles but a few
scattered cottages. Its fate had been harder than that of 61 Russell