The old house known now as Arborfield House was rebuilt some years after Miss Mitford knew it. The style is, of course, quite modern, but the beautiful grounds, with their magnificent trees and the river winding through them, remain unchanged, together with the luxuriant flower gardens, but which are now carefully tended. We have wandered through those grounds and have seen the poplars and acacias and firs gracefully blending their foliage together as she has described them. [Illustration: IN ABERLEIGH PARK] Miss Mitford had a decided liking for gipsies, and they often figure in her village stories. “There is nothing under the sun,” she writes, “that harmonizes so well with nature, especially in her woodland recesses, as that picturesque people who are, so to say, the wild genus—the pheasants and roebucks of the human race.” In one of these tales, after describing a spot of singularly wild beauty some miles distant from her home, where a dark deep pool lay beneath the shade of great trees, she says:— “In this lovely place I first saw our gipsies. They had pitched their little tent under one of the oak trees.... The party consisted only of four—an old crone in a tattered red cloak and black bonnet who was stooping over a kettle of which the contents were probably as savoury as that of Meg Merrilees, renowned in story; a pretty black-eyed girl at work under the trees; a sunburnt urchin of eight or nine, collecting sticks and dead leaves to feed their out-of-door fire; and a slender lad two or three years older, who lay basking in the sun, with a couple of shabby dogs of the sort called mongrel in all the joy of idleness, whilst a grave, patient donkey stood grazing hard by. It was a pretty picture, with its soft autumnal sky, its rich woodiness, its sunshine, its verdure, the light smoke curling from the fire, and the group disposed around so harmless poor outcasts! and so happy—a beautiful picture! I stood gazing at it till I was half ashamed to look longer, and came away half afraid that they should depart before I could see them again. “This fear I soon found to be groundless. The old gipsy was a celebrated fortune-teller.... The whole village rang with the predictions of this modern Cassandra.... I myself could not help admiring the real cleverness, the genuine gipsy tact with which she adapted her foretellings to the age, the habits and the known desires and circumstances of her clients. “To our little pet Lizzie, for instance, a damsel of seven, she predicted a fairing; to Ben Kirby, a youth of thirteen, head batter of the boys, a new cricket ball; to Ben’s sister Lucy, a girl some three years his senior, a pink top-knot; whilst for Miss Sophia Matthews, an old-maidish schoolmistress ... she foresaw one handsome husband; and for the smart widow Simmons two, etc. etc.