But to return to the road, which presently comes to the charming village of Froxfield, with its wide village green and great red-brick barracks of almshouses, founded in 1686 by Sarah, Duchess of Somerset, for fifty clergymen's widows, and perched up on a bank above the right-hand side of the highway. [Sidenote: _SAVERNAKE FOREST_] Thence, nearly all the way into Marlborough, seven miles ahead, the road lies through Savernake Forest and its outskirts, passing the loveliest forest scenery in England. Nothing can compare for magnificence with the massed beeches and oaks of Savernake, whose glorious alleys of foliage extend for miles in every direction. These fine full-grown trees are planted for the most part in a well-considered design, and radiate from a central point in eight directions. These "Eight Walks," as they are called, vary in length from four miles downwards, and lie to the south of the road. The highway runs through the northern verge of the Forest, quite open and hedgeless all the way, with two gates across it, about two miles apart. The scenery is like nothing so much as a painting by De Wint or Constable. The Marquis of Ailesbury, to whom this noble demesne (the only Forest in the possession of a subject) belongs, has his residence near the southern boundary of the Forest, at Tottenham House, which is a singularly plain building externally, and so reminiscent in name of the Tottenham Court Road that it would have been exquisitely appropriate had the late Marquis sold the estate to Sir John Blundell Maple instead of to Lord Iveagh. I suppose the eccentricities of the late Marquis of Ailesbury will become the subject of curious legends in the coming by-and-by. He was born out of his time, and was a kind of "throw-back" to earlier types that flourished when the Prince Regent and the Toms and Jerrys disported themselves in the famous Corinthian manner. The glades of Savernake still remain in the family, but were alienated to Lord Iveagh, the man of Dublin stout, of whom the quaint Biblical conceit was invented by some temperance wag: "He who is not for us is agin us.[3] He brews XX." Lord Iveagh bought the estates and paid for them, but the House of Lords refused to sanction the sale, and so Savernake still belongs to the Brudenell-Bruces. The late Marquis had a perfect genius for dissipating wealth. A "horsey" man among the "horsey," his favourite companions were sporting men of the more unrefined type, and he was hail-fellow with the cab-men and 'bus-men of London. Radicals found in his career a text for their discourses and a reason for abolishing the House of Lords as an hereditary chamber; and the ballet-girls of the London theatres regarded him as all a Peer should be. One who knew "Lord Stomach-ache," as he was playfully nicknamed before he had succeeded to the Marquisate and was yet Lord Savernake, said--