Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged since those eventful days. A plough has never disturbed the turf, and the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now. Here stood the camp; here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the , and spots where the midden-heaps lay are still to be observed. At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and thistles, the old and calls, the of the halters; to help seeing rows of tents and the impedimenta of the soldiery. From within the canvases come guttural of foreign tongues, and broken songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly of the King’s German Legion that slept round the tent-poles hereabout at that time.
It was nearly ninety years ago. The British uniform of the period, with its immense epaulettes, queer cocked-hat, breeches, gaiters, cartridge-box, shoes, and what not, would look strange and barbarous now. Ideas have changed; invention has followed invention. Soldiers were monumental objects then. A divinity still hedged kings here and there; and war was considered a glorious thing.
old manor-houses and hamlets lie in the ravines and hollows among these hills, where a stranger had hardly ever been seen till the King chose to take the baths yearly at the sea-side watering-place a few miles to the south; as a consequence of which in a cloud upon the open country around. Is it necessary to add that the echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that time, still linger about here in more or less fragmentary form, to be caught by the ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them I have forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never forget.
Phyllis told me the story with her own lips. She was then an old lady of seventy-five, and her a lad of fifteen. She silence as to her share in the incident, till she should be ‘dead, buried, and forgotten.’ Her life was prolonged twelve years after the day of her , and she has now been dead nearly twenty. The oblivion which in her and she courted for herself has only fallen on her, with the unfortunate result of an upon her memory; since such fragments of her story as got abroad at the time, and have been kept alive ever since, are those which are most unfavourable to her character.
It all began with the arrival of the York Hussars, one of the foreign regiments above to. Before that day scarcely a soul had been seen near her father’s house for weeks. When a noise like the brushing skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was her father grinding his on the stone in the garden for his favourite of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a bush cut into a and shape. There is no such in country places now as there was in those old days.
Yet all the while King George and his court were at his favourite sea-side resort, not more than five miles off.
The daughter’s was great, but beyond the seclusion of the girl lay the seclusion of the father. If her social condition was , his was darkness. Yet he enjoyed his darkness, while her twilight oppressed her. Dr. had been a professional man whose taste for lonely over metaphysical questions had diminished his practice till it no longer paid him to keep it going; after which............