“The situation is, like most grottoes, placed where a grotto would not be looked for: it joins to the house. Now having told its only defect, I will go on to the rest. The first room is fitted up entirely with shells, the sides and ceiling in beautiful mosaic, a rich cornice of flowers in baskets and cornucopias, and the little yellow sea snail is so disposed in shades as to resemble knots of ribbon which seem to tye up some of the bunches of flowers. There is a bed for the Hermit, which is composed of rich shells, and so shaded that the curtain seems folded and flowing.... The room adjoining it is the true and proper style for a grotto; it is composed of rough rock work in a very bold taste, the water falls down it into a cold bath. This grotto is about 50 yards from the Thames, to which the descent is very precipitate. From the Shell Room you have no advantage of the Thames, from the other room you have a view of it. The House to which this grotto is joined is a small habitation where Lady Fane used to pass a good deal of time. Lord Fane’s seat[437] is about a mile from it: it has not indeed the view of the Thames, but is finely situated in a bower of Beech Wood, and before it a pretty prospect. From the Grotto we went to a Wood by the Thames, where we sat and eat our cold dinner very comfortably. In the afternoon we walked up a hill which commands a fine prospect, the Thames winds about in the manner it does at Cliefden. There is a want of wood, as I think the country rather flat, but the prospect is very extensive; you see Oxford and Reading, one on the right, the other on the left hand. In our road thither one of the wheels took fire and burnt thro’ the axletree.... A wheelwright was apply’d to but he had been carousing at a christening, and was not in that degree of sober sense requisite to make even an axletree. A Justice of the peace whom the King had knighted lived hard by; to him we applyed for a coach, as it was part of his office to send vagrants to the place of their abode. Alas! his coach, which contrary to other things used to rest on the week days and work only on the Sabbath, had not been licensed, to the great inconvenience of his lady and the grief of Carter John, who one day in the week was a coachman.... What was to be done? The sun was declining, we were 20 miles from home.... A good inn with the sign of the Blue Boar, Green Dragon, or Red Lion would have pleased us better than all we had seen, but--Alas! the only village within reach offered us a homely lodging under thatched roofs. We were a party of seven, and might have stormed the village with more ease than the French can Bergen-op-Zoom, but the plunder w’d not have given us a supper, or the place afforded us a lodging. But on finding the uncoached Justice was married to Sir Robert Sutton’s niece,[438] an acquaintance of Mrs. Donnellan’s, she sent her compliments, told our distress, and we