The gates of the park open upon the very extremity of the Hill, close to Mansfield House, now an hotel, but formerly a residence of the Lord Chancellor of that name, who once had a redoubtable encounter with the mob, and to Wick House, where sometime lived Sir Joshua Reynolds. Immediately beyond is the Terrace, an umbrageous promenade, dear in morning hours to nurses and their lively charges, and later in the day somewhat of a Rotten Row or a ladies' furlong. From his seat beneath the trees the gazer looks down away to the west upon one of the most lovely sights that earth affords. Between edgings of quivering green, of lighter and of deeper hues, winds a glistening silver ribbon, in and out among villas and townlets, always narrowing, and when the limit of vision is reached, it seems to the straining eye as though meadow and woodland met and stayed all further passage. From this eminence the country lies mapped out as though seen from a balloon; and far away beyond all trace of the river there closes in a dark and swaying mass of foliage, like to one dense land of trees. A thin line of brilliant blossom marks in early summer the Chestnut Avenue in Bushey Park; and were it not that here and there the sun catches a high church tower, a gilded vane, or mayhap a turret of feudal Windsor, it would seem from here above that this wide and lovely stretch of country was still a vast untrodden forest. So great is the height that even immediately below the long, comfortable pleasure-boats loom tiny as toys, while the steamers, happily rarer in these waters than they are lower down, become almost picturesque in the distance. All this gleaming valley, stretching across to the west, is the way we have come; these are the woodlands past which we have rowed, and beneath whose shadow we have rested; those the bends and reaches where we have done some honest, straightforward pulling; those the shaded lawns where we have longed for tennis, the rather for the sakes of the muslin goddesses we furtively watched than for pure love of that Olympian game. That which remains of our course shoots us past the skirts of Richmond town, the river bank coloured and diversified with houses old and brown, and houses new and white, with here and there yet other lawns. One more embowered eyot comes round which the waters, parting, gently swirl. Here lie anchored a lazy barge or two, and as we plash past them into mid-stream again we are full in face of Richmond Bridge, grey, many-arched, and slightly bowed. Beyond the bridge there rises a chain of swelling uplands, all massy with foliage, and dotted with the red and white of lotus-eating villas. /J. Penderel-Brodhurst/. [Illustration: RICHMOND BRIDGE.] CHAPTER IX. RICHMOND TO BATTERSEA.