When Basing House was laid in ruins the Marquis of Winchester retired to his hunting lodge of Hawk Wood, to the south of Basingstoke, and, enlarging it, made the place his residence. His son, created Duke of Bolton, employed Inigo Jones to build a new house on the site of the lodge, and this is the present Hackwood Park. The existing house stands in the midst of dense and tangled woodlands, and although imposing, is a somewhat gloomy pile, with a ghost story. That bitter lawyer, Richard Bethell, of whom it was said that he ‘dismissed Hell, with costs, and took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of everlasting damnation,’ when he became Lord Chancellor and was created Baron Westbury, purchased Hackwood Park, and it was to one of his friends that the ‘Grey Lady’ of the mansion presented herself. Lord Westbury and a party of his friends had arrived from town soon after the purchase, and at a late hour they retired to rest, saying good-night to one another in the corridor. One of the guests woke up in the middle of the night and found his room strangely illuminated, with the indistinct outlines of a human figure visible in the midst of the uncanny glow. Thinking this some practical joke, and feeling very drowsy, he turned round and fell off to sleep again, to wake at a later hour and see the figure of a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress. With more courage than most people would probably have shown under the circumstances, he, instead of putting his head under the bed-clothes, jumped out, whereupon the lady modestly retired. Instead of going to bed again, he sat down and wrote an account of the occurrence; but when at breakfast Lord Westbury and his other friends kept continually asking him how he had slept, his suspicions as to a practical joke having been played upon him were renewed. He accordingly parried all these queries and said he had slept excellently, until Lord Westbury said, ‘Now, look here, we saw that lady dressed in grey follow you into your room last night, you know!’ Explanations followed, but the story of the ‘Grey Lady’ remains mysterious to this day. XVIII The whereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from afar by the huge and odd-looking clock-tower of the Town Hall, added to that building in 1887. Its windy height, visible from many miles around, is also favourable to the hearing at a distance of its sweet-toned carillons, modelled on the pattern of the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking of the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and the wind is favourable, you may hear those tuneful bells far away over the melancholy wolds that hem in Basingstoke to the north and west, or listen to them by the waters of the Loddon eastward, or the undulating farm-lands of the south. [Sidenote: _HOLY GHOST CHAPEL_]