Apsley Manor was one of those residences to be found scattered over the country, which are vaguely described as Tudor--memorials to the cultured taste in England, before the restoration with its sponge of Puritanical Piety wiped out the last traces of that refinement which Normandy had lent. Britain was destined to be great in commerce, and not even the inoculation of half the blood of France could ever make her people great in art as well. It would be difficult to say the exact date when Apsley Manor was built. Certain it was that Elizabeth, in one of her progresses--the resort of a clever woman to fill a needy purse--had stayed there on her way to Oxford. The room, the bed even in which she was supposed to have slept, still remain there. Each owner, as he parted with the property, exacted a heavy premium upon that doubtful relic of history. None of them wished to remove it from the room where it had so many romantic associations; but they one and all had used it as a lever to raise the price of the property--if only a hundred pounds--beyond that which they had, in the first case, paid for it themselves. Once, in fact, the hangings had been taken down and the bed itself lifted from the ground before the very eyes of the intended purchaser; but that had been too much for him. He had given in. There is England's greatness! Can it be wondered--much as we pose to despise them--that we are the only nation in Europe which has given shelter to the tribes of Israel? In spring-time, the Manor looked wonderful--the lawns cut for the first time since the winter, the hedges of blackthorn splashed thick with snow-blossom, and daffodils, as if sackfuls of new-minted gold were emptied underneath the trees and elves had scattered pieces here and there from out the mass. Birds were building in all the thickets, and the young leaves--virgin green--shyly hid their love-making. Everything alive was possessed with a new-found energy. The sparrows--most ostentatious of any bird there is--flew about, trailing long threads of hay, with an air as if they carried the Golden Fleece in their beaks each time they returned to the apple trees. But other creatures were as busy as they. Strange little brown birds--whitethroats and linnets perhaps, if the eye could only have followed them--flew in and out of the blackthorn hedges all day long. Thrushes and blackbirds hopped pompously about the lawns, and the starlings chattered like old women on the roofs of the red gables.