The drive from the front of Windsor Castle is through a broad and stately avenue, three miles in length, straight as an arrow and level as a standing pool; and this white highway through the green and fragrant sod is sumptuously embowered, from end to end, with double rows of magnificent elms and oaks. The Windsor avenue, like the splendid chestnut grove at Bushey Park, long famous among the pageants of rural England, has often been described. It is after leaving this that the rambler comes upon the rarer beauties of Windsor Park and Forest. From the far end of the avenue--where, in a superb position, the equestrian statue of King George the Third rises on its massive pedestal of natural rock,--the road winds away, through shaded dell and verdant glade, past great gnarled beeches and under boughs of elm, and yew, and oak, till its silver thread is lost in the distant woods. At intervals a sinuous pathway strays off to some secluded lodge, half hidden in foliage--the property of the Crown, and the rustic residence of a scion of the royal race. In one of those retreats dwelt poor old George the Third, in the days of his mental darkness; and the memory of the agonising king seems still to cast a shadow on the mysterious and melancholy house. They show you, under glass, in one of the lodge gardens, an enormous grapevine, owned by the Queen--a vine which, from its single stalwart trunk, spreads its teeming branches, laterally, more than a hundred feet in each direction. So come use and thrift, hand in hand with romance! Many an aged oak is passed, in your progress, round which, "at still midnight," Herne the Hunter might yet take his ghostly prowl, shaking his chain "in a most hideous and dreadful manner." The wreck of the veritable Herne's Oak, it is said, was rooted out, together with other ancient and decayed trees, in the time of George the Third, and in somewhat too literal fulfilment of his Majesty's misinterpreted command. Illustration: "The Curfew Tower."