[Illustration: PRESENTATION TO CHARLES THE SECOND OF THE FIRST PINE-APPLE GROWN IN ENGLAND. _From the painting at Ham House._] Castlemaine, shortly after the birth of this putative daughter, became a pervert to the Roman Catholic religion, and his wife, seizing upon this as a pretext, finally left him and lived openly as the King’s mistress. Several of her children were acknowledged by Charles, and two of them were created dukes, her second son, Henry Fitzroy, becoming Duke of Grafton, her third, George, Duke of Northumberland. She was, with an astounding display of cynical humour, in 1670 created Baroness Nonsuch, “in consideration of her own personal virtues,” and Duchess of Cleveland; and as Duke of Cleveland her eldest son succeeded her. Thus, with Barbara, with Nell Gwynne, and others, Charles the Second abundantly recruited the ducal order and other ranks of the peerage; thus giving point to the Duke of Buckingham’s joke. The King had been addressed at Court as the “father of his people.” “Of a good many of them,” observed Buckingham behind his hand. The Earl of Castlemaine lived to see a good many changes. It was not necessary in those times to live to a great age to witness many revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was committed to the Tower shortly after the accession of William the Third, and remained a prisoner there from February 1689 until February 10, 1690. He died in 1705. A little to the north of Dorney, between it and the Bath road, are the remains of Burnham Abbey, a house for Benedictine nuns founded in 1265 by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and titular King of the Romans, brother of Edward the Third. There were an abbess and nine nuns when the establishment was surrendered to Henry the Eighth’s Commissioners. The ruins are now amid the rickyards and agricultural setting of the Abbey Farm, and although the church has wholly disappeared, the remains of the chapter-house and the domestic buildings form an exquisite picture, untouched by any busybodying “tidying-up” activities. The seeker after the picturesque, who finds historical evidences destroyed by well-meaning “restorers”; the artist, who generally discovers the artistic negligence of his foregrounds abolished in favour of neatly kept flower-beds and gravel paths and the feeling of ruin and decay thus utterly disregarded, will be rejoiced here, and will find the ruins still put to farming uses, just as Girtin and Turner and the other roaming artists of a hundred years ago were accustomed to find the castles and abbeys of their day. There is more pure æsthetic delight in such scenes as this, left in their natural decay and put to the uses to which they in the logical order of things descended, than in the same place swept and garnished to be made a show. The Lady Chapel and the refectory are stables, where the cart-horses shelter and form a picture so exactly like Morland’s stable interiors that the place might well have been a model for him. Every