“What a horrible place this must be,” I said, “for they cannot find one word of description”; for the very ugliest places we had seen had often been described in the advertisements as “picturesque manorial residences,” “beautiful villas with hanging woods,” &c. But my mother rightly thought that the very simple description was perhaps in itself a reason why we should see it.... Long before we could arrive at Ore, we passed under a grey wall overhung by trees. “It looks almost as if there might be a Holmhurst inside that wall,” I said. Then we reached a gate between two clipped yew-trees, and a board announced, “This house is to be let or sold.” We drove in. It was a lovely day. An arched gateway was open towards the garden, showing a terrace, vases of scarlet geraniums, and a background of blue sea. My mother and I clasped each other’s hands and simultaneously exclaimed—“This is Holmhurst!” We found that the name of the place was Little Ridge. There were six places called Ridge in the neighbourhood, and it was very desirable to change the name, to prevent confusion at the post-office and elsewhere. Could we call it anything but Holmhurst? Afterwards we discovered that Holmhurst meant an ilex wood, and our great tree is an ilex. And here they made their home. Ten years later his adopted mother died here, and here he passed out of these shadows and unrealities, suddenly and painlessly, when another thirty-two years had gone, little more than two years after he had, in writing the concluding words of the story of his life, said: When I look at the dates of births and deaths in our family in the Family Bible, I see that I have already exceeded the age which has usually been allotted to the Hares. Can it be that, while I still feel so young, the evening of life is closing in? Perhaps it may not be so; perhaps long years may still be before me. I hope so; but the lesson should be the same, for “man can do no better than live in eternity’s sunrise.” It would be unpardonable to leave unmentioned the additions to the house he loved so well and the gardens and shrubberies he delighted in. Still stands the sundial on the lawn, that sundial which had been placed by his great-great-grandfather, Bishop Hare, on his house of the Vatche, at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, and was presented to him in 1859 by the then owners of the Vatche. Still one looks delightfully across these uplands down to the sea, where the craggy ruins of Hastings Castle cut across the horizon, and the streets of Hastings come crawling dimly up out of the vale; but the Hospice in the grounds, where he continually housed and entertained his pensioners, is empty, and the garden-paths have lost their trimness and become overgrown with grass since strangers have come and reduced the staff. Even Queen Anne, whom he brought down from London and set up in the meadow, looks neglected.