336 THE OLD MANOR HOUSE 



The house stands at the end of a long and 

 narrow valley, on a bed of what geologists, I 

 believe, call " green sand." Voltaire remarked that 

 his only objection to the name " Holy Roman 

 Empire," applied as it was in his day, and as it had 

 been, for centuries, to the possessions of the House 

 of Hapsburg, was that it was neither " Holy" nor 

 " Roman," nor an " Empire " ; and, certainly, to the 

 ordinary eye, the bed of green sand on which 

 Bingham's Melcombe is said to stand, appears to 

 be neither green nor sand. It is surrounded by 

 steep chalk hills which part, here and there, into deep 

 " coombs," and are often crowned by plantations 

 of beech the tree which is most at home in the 

 chalk of larch, or of spruce fir. The soft, sweet, 

 springy turf of the downs yields to innumerable 

 rabbits the food which they most love, and which 

 can perhaps be best spared to them by man. It 

 is richly carpeted, in spring, with cowslips, whilst, 

 in summer and autumn, amidst a sprinkling of the 

 rarer orchises, the bee, the fly, and the green- 

 man, it is spangled by myriads of minute flowers 

 and, as a rule, the smaller the size of a flower, 

 the more exquisite is its loveliness beds of the 

 deep-blue polygala and the light-blue scabious, broad 

 patches of yellow crowsfoot and dwarf golden rod, 



