Near Alveston mill you must drag your boat over a narrow strip of land and launch her again for Charlecote. Now once more this delicious water-way is broad and fine. As it sweeps past a stately, secluded home, once that of the ancient family of Peers, toward the Wellesbourne Road, a great bed of cultivated white water-lilies [hitherto they have all been yellow] adorns it, and soon there are glimpses of the deer that browse or prance or slumber beneath the magnificent oaks and elms and limes and chestnuts of Charlecote Park. No view of Charlecote can compare with the view of it that is obtained from the river; and if its proprietor values its reputation for beauty he ought to be glad that lovers of the beautiful sometimes have an opportunity to see it from this point. The older wing, with its oriel window and quaint belfry, is of a peculiar, mellow red, relieved against bright green ivy, to which only the brush of a painter could do justice. Nothing more delicious, in its way, is to be found; at least, the only piece of architecture in this region that excels it in beauty of colour is the ancient house of Compton-Wynyate; but that is a marvel of loveliness, the gem of Warwickshire, and, in romantic quaintness, it surpasses all its fellows. The towers of the main building of Charlecote are octagon, and a happy alternation of thin and slender with thick, truncated turrets much enhances the effect of quaintness in this grave and opulent edifice. A walled terrace, margined with urns and blazing with flowers of gold and crimson, extends from the river front to the waterside, and terminates in a broad flight of stone steps, at the foot of which are moored the barges of the house of Lucy. No spectacle could suggest more of aristocratic state and austere magnificence than this sequestered edifice does, standing there, silent, antique, venerable, gorgeous, surrounded by its vast, thick-wooded park, and musing, as it has done for hundreds of years, on the silver Avon that murmurs at its base. Close by there is a lovely waterfall, over which some little tributary of the river descends in a fivefold wave of shimmering crystal, wafting a music that is heard in every chamber of the house and in all the fields and woodlands round about. It needs the sun to bring out the rich colours of Charlecote, but once when I saw it from the river a storm was coming on, and vast masses of black and smoke-coloured cloud were driving over it, in shapeless blocks and jagged streamers, while countless frightened birds were whirling above it; and presently, when the fierce lightning flashed across the heavens and a deluge of rain descended and beat upon it, a more romantic sight was never seen. [Illustration: _The Abbey Mills, Tewkesbury._]