Hampden is enchanting!--more delightful than even I thought it would be, and quite comfortable enough. Of course we want a multitude of things--(baths, wine-glasses, tumblers, cans, etc.!) but those I can hire from Wycombe. Our great deficiency is lamps! Last night we crept about in this vast house, with hardly any light.... As to the ghost, Mrs. Duval (the housekeeper) scoffs at it! The ghost-room is the tapestry-room, from which there is a staircase down to the breakfast-room. A good deal of the tapestry is loose, and when there is any wind it flaps and flaps. Hence all the tales.... The servants are rather bewildered by the size of everything, and--like me--were almost too excited to sleep.... The children are wandering blissfully about, exploring everything. And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored, beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming and comfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--in its half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure and simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected pictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth," presented to the owner of Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of King John's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden lies buried; the deserted library on the top floor, running along the beautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to the patriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about 1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds, the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in an Elizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by the agent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasures of the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of John Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf; the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house, stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, just visible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history with the slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under the golden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense. Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of _Marcella_ will find as much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it was then--in the description of Mellor.