It is an old palace thrown aside, given over to poor relatives, by royalty,--as we throw aside an old gown; a vast pile of dingy, red brick that has straggled over acres of Hampton parish, and is kept within bounds by a high wall of the same ugly material. It has pushed itself up into towers and turrets, with pinnacles and spires rising from its battlemented walls. It has thrust itself out into oriel and queer little latticed windows that peep into the gardens and overhang the three quadrangles, and is with its vast gardens and park, with its wide canal and avenues of green old trees, the most delightfully ugly, old place imaginable. Here kings and queens have lived and loved, suffered and died, from Cardinal Wolsey's time down to the days of Queen Anne. It is now one of England's show places; one portion of its vast extent, with the grounds, being thrown open to the public, the remainder given to decayed nobility, or wandering, homeless representatives of royalty,--a kind of royal almshouse, in fact. A curtained window, the flutter of a white hand, were to us the only signs of inhabitation. Through thirty or more narrow, dark, bare rooms,--bare but for the pictures that crowded the walls,--we wandered. There were two or three halls of stately proportions finely decorated with frescoes by Verrio, and one or two royal stairways, up and down which slippered feet have passed, silken skirts trailed, and heavy hearts been carried, in days gone by. The pictures are mostly portraits of brave men and lovely women, of kings and queens and royal favorites,--poor Nell Gwynne among them, who began life by selling oranges in a theatre, and ended it by selling virtue in a palace. The Vandyck faces are wonderfully beautiful. They gaze upon you through a mist, a golden haze,--like that which hangs over the hills in the Indian summer,--from out deep, spiritual eyes; a dream of fair women they are.