If there be any who are so jealous of the honour of our British forests and woods that they resent any competition with their beauty, and look upon all new-comers from over the sea as undesirable aliens, they should, at any rate, allow that, though they would be out of tune in a wild forest, they bring lovely harmonies of colour and form into the more artificial scenes with which we adorn the immediate surroundings of our country houses. They are no more foreign than the numberless flowers with which our predecessors used to furnish their beds and borders, and they have two great advantages over these, as I hope to show presently. As to the question of fitness or unfitness, that is a matter of conditions and arrangement. I know a vast park in which the old oaks and beeches used to make up a sylvan scene of incomparable grandeur. Some years ago the owner, fired with a new and wholly uneducated enthusiasm, studded the stately forest with lovely little Japanese maples, but without any intervening masses of cultivation to make the garden blend with the primeval trees. The effect was deplorably ludicrous—nay, it was worse than ludicrous: it was an act of desecration. Had my friend been more judicious, what charming effects he might have conjured up in a suitable place with those same little crimson bushes which he condemned to play so silly a part in among his glorious secular oaks! What magical scenes have been called up with their help at Westonbirt! But those pictures were produced by knowledge. There was a time when in spring and summer I used to look forward to the autumn, hailing its advent as the season of sport, when every day brought some new joy. Now that I have left the autumn of life far behind me and am deep in its winter, I have no love left for the shortening days, the rustle of falling leaves, and the cold patter of the rain on the dimmed panes of glass. And yet when the sun shines, how beautiful is the Indian summer! How lovely the dismissal of the haze floating away across the valley! Yes! Autumn has its consolations. Foreigners who have never been in this country generally think that we live like newts and frogs in a land of marshes and dismal morasses, curtained by fogs through which the sun’s rays never pierce, a land sadly breeding a mysterious disease which they call “Le spleen.” In the fifties, as Disraeli once put it, they looked upon us as “an insular people subject to fogs, and possessing a powerful middle class,” both, in their eyes, equally objectionable. All the greater was their surprise and admiration when they came to realize the soft loveliness of our landscapes. Sixty years ago and more I was sent home from Eton for a few days’ change after some trifling ailment, and my father took me, and a French friend of his who was staying with him, to Richmond. Never shall I forget that man’s astonished enthusiasm when the view from Richmond Hill burst upon his sight.