[Illustration: DORNEY COURT: THE GREAT HALL, SHOWING THE MODEL PINE-APPLE. _The seventeenth-century sampler hangs on the panelling._] It is one of the greatest charms of our long-settled English social order, that we have in this England of ours a not inconsiderable number of ancient homes that have been “home” to one family throughout the changes and chances of centuries, and in Dorney Court we see such a house. Here, on the old woodwork, are painted the heraldic shields of the Palmers, with their greyhound courant conspicuous, and the devices of the families with whom they have intermarried. An interesting incident in fruit-growing history belonging to Dorney Court is alluded to in the model on a gigantic scale of a pineapple, shown in the hall. It recalls the fact that the first pineapple grown in England was produced here in the reign of Charles the Second by the Dorney Court gardener. A panel-picture at Ham House, the seat of the Earl of Dysart, near Richmond, illustrates this first English-grown pineapple being presented to the King in the gardens of either Ham or Hampton Court, by Rose, the royal gardener. The rendering of the architecture in the picture makes it uncertain which of the two places is intended. It will be observed by the illustration that there has been a great improvement in the art of growing hot-house pineapples since that time, for it is a very small specimen that is being offered to the King. Foremost among the thirty or more portraits at Dorney are the two large Lelys hanging in the hall, representing Roger Palmer, Baron Limerick, and Earl of Castlemaine, and his wife Barbara, the beautiful and notorious Barbara Villiers. They are half-lengths. She is curiously shown, holding what looks like the model of a church-steeple in her left hand. Lely intended it for a castle, and thus is seen to be guilty of painting an Anglo-French pun; “Castle_main_.” The beautiful Barbara is better known in history as “Barbara Villiers,” her maiden name, and by the title of Duchess of Cleveland. Born in 1641, she married Palmer in 1659. He was shortly afterwards raised to the peerage. There were no children of this marriage, for it was very shortly afterwards that Lady Castlemaine began that extraordinary career of vice which has made her name eminent among even the notorious beauties of Charles the Second’s scandalous Court. The first of her seven children was a daughter, Anne, born in May 1661, and at first acknowledged by Palmer, although Lady Castlemaine had undoubtedly been mistress of Charles the Second since May 1660. There are three portraits of Anne Palmer, or Anne Palmer Fitzroy, as she was afterwards known, at Dorney, the earliest of them exhibiting a romantic hilly landscape for background, with a beacon or fire-cresset along the winding road, such as were placed on the more obscure ways in those times for the guidance of travellers. She married in 1675 Thomas Lennard, Lord Dacre and Earl of Sussex.