WALPOLE HOUSE 
But when the late Sir Herbert Tree took the place on a long 
lease from Sir John Thornycroft, 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 
naiveté, that ‘‘ Queen Elizabeth used to come here to see her 
minister, Mr. Pitt,” that even the story of King Alfred and the 
195 13* 
