“The priest’s hiding-place,” she continues, “was discovered early in the nineteenth century. A narrow ladder led down into this gloomy resort, and at the bottom was found a crucifix. As many as a dozen carefully masked openings into dark hiding-places have been discovered in this storey; no doubt they were connected one with the other, although the clue to the labyrinth is wanting.” A broad terrace walk lies behind the Court, and from this terrace a flight of stone steps of quaint construction leads down to a beautiful walled garden. Here we can imagine Belinda and her friends enjoying the delights of a summer evening and surveying the wide view which lies beyond the garden of sloping fields to a wooded valley watered by a rushing stream. A pathway of the softest turf leads from the foot of the steps across the garden to the pillars of a former gateway surmounted by stone balls and flanked by two ancient gnarled yews, which stand like sentinels to guard the entrance. In the centre of the garden the turf widens to a circular piece of lawn, upon which stands an old sundial. It is surrounded by gay flowers of all sorts, and is partly enclosed by a rustic fence, forming a fairy garden as it were within the great garden. [Illustration: THE GARDEN STEPS] Beyond the main boundary wall the greensward slopes down abruptly to a chain of fish ponds. These must have been kept neat and trim when fish, so much needed for a Roman Catholic household, was difficult to obtain beyond the precincts of the Court. But the ponds are beautiful in their neglected condition, with their luxuriant growth of water plants, their surrounding trees, whose branches are reflected below, and the occasional glimpse of a moorhen skimming past. Miss Mitford speaks of there being “on the lawn in front of the mansion some magnificent elms, splendid both in size and form, and one gigantic broad-browed oak—the real oak of the English forest—that must have seen many centuries.” Its upper boughs have now gone, but its huge trunk and lower foliage still remain. It is of this oak that a poetess of the day wrote:— “Triumphant o’er the tooth of time And o’er the woodman’s blade, Yon oak still rears its head sublime And spreads its ample shade.” À propos of Ufton Court, with its ingeniously contrived hiding-places for unhappy refugees, Miss Mitford writes: “I am indebted to my friend Mrs. Hughes for the account of another hiding-place in which the interest is ensured by that charm of charms—an unsolved and insoluble mystery.”