A Stag Occasionally Leaps The
Boundary And Forages Among The Farmers' Corn, Or Visits A Garden, And
Then The Owner Can Form Some Idea Of What Must Have Been The Difficulties
Of Agriculture In Mediaeval Days.
Deer more than double the interest of a
park.
A park without deer is like a wall without pictures. However well
proportioned the room, something is lacking if the walls be blank.
However noble the oaks and wide the sweep of sward, there is something
wanting if antlers do not rise above the fern. The pictures that the deer
make are moving and alive; they dissolve and re-form in a distant frame
of tree and brake. Lately the herd has been somewhat thinned, having
become too numerous. One slope is bare of grass, a patch of yellow sand,
which if looked at intently from a distance seems presently to be all
alive like mites in cheese, so thick are the rabbits in the warren. Under
a little house, as it were, built over a stream is a chalybeate fountain
with virtues like those of Tunbridge Wells.
The park is open to visitors - here comes a gay four-in-hand heavily
loaded sweeping by on its road to that summer town. There is much
ironstone in the soil round about. At the edge of the park stands an old
farmhouse of timber and red tile, with red oast-house beside it, built
with those gables which our ancestors seemed to think made such excellent
rooms within.
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