WALPOLE HOUSE 







But when the late Sir Herbert Tree took the place on a long 

 lease from Sir John Thorny croft, he proceeded to restore the 

 house and rehabilitate the garden, and this, he and Lady Tree 

 accomplished, in the judicious, tasteful, and correct fashion that 

 might have been expected of them. 



When I was drawing there in the absence of its present owners, 

 the skill and industry of one old gardener kept the garden in order ; 

 his kindly wife acted as caretaker, and the pair had evidently 

 conceived a high regard for their former mistress, and often re- 

 marked that " Lady Tree planted this " or " Lady Tree did that," 

 from which I realized that she and her distinguished husband 

 must have cared much for the place, and cared for it intelligently. 

 The finest standard roses were of Lady Tree's planting. The 

 stone-flagged pathway which appears in my drawing, and the 

 paved sunken area, to which, from the garden, the descent is by 

 stone steps were probably features of the house in its earlier 

 days ; how grateful should we be that, having fallen into 

 disrepair, asphalt, or gravel, was not substituted for stone, as in 

 philistine hands, one or the other might easily have been. 



Every ancient house perforce has its ghost story ; its respecta- 

 bility would be impugned without it : Walpole House is no excep- 

 tion. There is a tale that a weird old man clad in black velvet, 

 with iron-grey hair, and a sad, but not unpleasing countenance, 

 his face twisted and drawn down by paralysis, is occasionally 

 seen in the upper rooms, but who he was in life, and what the 

 purport of his visitations, nobody seems to know. The house 

 with its broad, well-lighted staircase, is indeed much too cheerful 

 to fittingly harbour ghosts. 



Its present owner is a picture-lover, and many beautiful works 

 of art now adorn it ; they are principally by the late Sir Edward 

 Burne-Jones. To see these came one day someone who requested 

 permission to view the works of Mr. John Burns ! 



' The grand old gardener and his wife " to whom I have before 

 referred, far from smiling " at the claims of long descent " as 

 did their Tennysonian prototypes revelled in apocryphal stories, 

 testifying to the antiquity of the house. It is an absolute fact 

 that, first the one and then the other, informed me with delightful 

 naivete, that " Queen Elizabeth used to come here to see her 

 minister, Mr. Pitt," that even the story of King Alfred and the 



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