FULHAM PALACE 
Nor do I attempt to mention those worthies of England nearer 
to, and of, our own day, men of light and leading, and of letters ; 
learned divines, novelists, poet-laureates, politicians; in a word, 
half the illustrious men and women of the Victorian age. They 
must all have crossed the picturesque quadrangle—where even 
now the fountain can toss its iridescent spray much higher than 
the red-tiled roof—to reach the hospitable palace in which, from 
the eleventh century to the twentieth, the Bishops of London have 
welcomed the coming, and sped the parting guest. 
But to return to the Gardens! I had no personal acquaintance 
with them before the spring of 1915, when the compelling demands 
of the most terrible war on record disturbed their tranquillity. 
They are charming now, and must have been exceedingly lovely 
in the summers before 1914, when all God’s peace was upon them ; 
for their seclusion was complete—the encircling moat cutting them 
off from the noisy world of Fulham as entirely as a high stone 
wall would have done—although, indeed, one of the surprises in 
most of the larger London gardens, is their strange repose, their 
singular aloofness from the turmoil outside. 
Here and there in the Fulham grounds, as elsewhere, it was 
even then obvious that the great strife had called away to the 
colours, all the younger men among the gardeners, and that the 
staff had been necessarily reduced—though apparently not to the 
same extent as in some still more extensive grounds of which I 
know, where one boy and sundry elderly men, attempted to do 
the work of thirteen, active under-gardeners. At Fulham the 
War had transformed the once beautiful park and warren—which 
are separated from the flower gardens only by a low wire fence— 
into a vast drilling ground. The oaks and the elms, during all 
their long existence, had never looked upon a stranger and sadder 
sight, for the bridge of boats from Fulham to Putney in Cromwell’s 
day was far less significant of suffering. Nevertheless the park, 
when I saw it, with the figures of men and horses moving among 
the trees, was not unpicturesque ; for khaki is, to use a painter’s 
adjective, a ‘‘ retiring”? colour, blending better with the various 
greens of nature than scarlet used to do. 
Often, when proceeding to my work in the mornings, I 
paused for a moment to watch the eternal marchings and 
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