Now if some nice English lord would come along and buy it, to sell it would not be so bitter. Sometimes places do sell just for sheer beauty, and Brandon has nothing else. Time was when it had deer and grouse and pheasants and wild little black cattle, to say nothing of hares and curlews and such small fry. But that was before the prosperity went from us to "the bad De Lacys", as they are called far and near. I suppose they deserved their name in the old days when they won it. They were a persecuting, wild-living, hard-riding, hard-drinking race ever and always, and the people do not forget it to them that they burned chapels and flayed peasants at the cart-wheel in the old unhappy times that, thank God, are passed for ever. The Brandons of Brandon and the De Lacys of Angry used in the old days to rule the county between them, though the Brandons, to believe the talk of the peasants and the more reliable county histories, were always good to their people. There was as much difference between them, say the country people, as between Brandon Hill and Angry Mountain. Dear Brandon, that we all opened our eyes upon nearly as soon as we were born! Brandon always seems to take the sunshine. There, beyond the trees of our park, the blue peak lifts gloriously a smiling face to heaven. The gold of sunset crowns it, and the roses of the dawn fall first upon its head. Usually it is purple as a pansy, but if the clouds lie on it they are silver wisps finer than gossamer. The cold weather turns Brandon to bronze and gold. There are times when the slopes of it are as golden as a May pasture with the gorse in bloom, and times again when the drifts of heather are like fields of scattered rose-leaves. Up there, where the little woods are, is like fairy-land. You are in a world of feathery aisles and arches. The ground under your feet in spring is dancing with the daffodils, or a little later with the wild hyacinths, and below them a carpet of the greenest moss. There are little trout-rivers, amber-brown, and always singing as softly as Oona, our nurse, used to sing her "Cusha Loo" to us to put us asleep. But for those same trout-streams often and often had we Brandons gone hungry.