blissfully about, exploring everything.

And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored,
beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming and
comfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--in
its half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure and
simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected
pictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth," presented to the owner of
Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of King
John's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden lies
buried; the deserted library on the top floor, running along the
beautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to the
patriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about
1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds,
the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in an
Elizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by the
agent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasures
of the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of John
Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf;
the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house,
stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, just
visible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history with
the slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under the
golden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense.

Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of _Marcella_ will find as
much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it was
then--in the description of Mellor.

Our old and dear friend, Mrs. J.R. Green, the widow of the historian,