[Illustration: JUNCTION OF ROADS SPOILED BY TRAMWAYS, BALDSLOW.] You come along it, at the beginning of Baldslow, to a weird corner where a road comes up from Sedlescomb and, cutting under the Old London Road in an archway, makes for St. Leonards. Here the tramway poles and wires are insistently ugly, and the village or hamlet of Baldslow itself is scarce prepossessing. A roadside public-house, a gaunt windmill, a few ugly cottages, and a tin tabernacle church are its component parts. But immediately beyond that corrugated and galvanised ecclesiastical horror the road grows beautiful, overhung with trees. Here, at the entrance to a country house in the domestic-gothic sort, are two very fine clipped yew-trees. It is Holmhurst, and the trees are those christened by Mr. Hare “Huz and Buz.” Holmhurst is not historic, in the larger way, but to those who are familiar with the literary work of Augustus J. C. Hare, it is a place to be regarded with interest and affection. Augustus Hare wrote many books. His “Walks in Rome” and “Walks in London” are the best known of them, but his “Story of my Life” is of course the most intimate, and it is the most endearing. His own half-humorous declaration that it is “a ponderous autobiography of a nobody” was heartily and unkindly endorsed by reviewers, but, at any rate, no one can read those six volumes without conceiving an affection for the author of them. He was a lovable man. Augustus Hare, born 1834, died January 22nd, 1903, never married. He came of the family of Hares of Hurstmonceaux, a family at one time so numerous and so abundantly intermarried with the titled and landed classes that he could claim cousinship in different degrees with a very large circle in Society. But to call him a Society man would be as unjust as it would be to style him a _dilettante_ in literature and the arts, for he had no vices, was no idler, and earned a very excellent literary repute. The “Story of my Life,” made up, as it is, largely from letters and journals, recounting his visits and the people he met, earned him with some sour critics of his work, the opprobrious title of “literary valet,” but it is so sincere and without artifice that the reproach is most undeserved, although his artistic, friendly, and family sympathies certainly often led him into praises which amusingly remind one of the famous epitaph on that Lady Jones who was “bland, passionate, and deeply religious. She was a niece of Horace Walpole and painted in water-colours, and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”