Every Londoner is familiar with the white marble group of figures in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, representing Queen Anne (now, alas! deceased) presiding over four seated effigies, emblematic of England, France, Ireland, and the North American Colonies of her days; but few recollect that this group is not the original of the one sculptured by Bird in 1712. Bird’s work had for many years fallen into a disgraceful state of neglect. Her Majesty’s nose had long been chipped off and her forearms had disappeared, while the four seated figures, with scarce a complete set of limbs among them, more nearly resembled the victims of a railway accident than the highly respectable allegorical group they really were. The whole composition was therefore cleared away, and an entirely new and scrupulously exact replica was made by the afterwards notorious Richard Belt, and placed in its stead. [Illustration: QUEEN ANNE, AT HOLMHURST.] The battered and grimy original disappeared from public ken, and was wholly forgotten, when Mr. Hare in 1893 discovered its component parts lying in a heap in the City of London stoneyard, on the point of being broken up, and greatly coveted them for the embellishment of Holmhurst. He found that the poor relics were jointly owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Lord Mayor, and eventually persuaded all those eminent personages to make him a present of the remains, which were removed by road to Holmhurst, “at great expense,” as he says, with the aid of twenty-eight horses, four trucks, four trollies, and sixteen men. He re-erected them in his grounds, at a still greater expense, on a circular stone pedestal, similar to the original, which he had quarried from the outcroppings of stone on this little estate. XLVIII Beyond Holmhurst comes the long-drawn parish of Ore, heralded by its modern church, rather overloaded with ornament. It replaces the old church of St. Helen, lying hidden away to the right, across a field and within a belt of trees. Augustus Hare thought the ruins of the old church “rather picturesque”: an instance of how an everyday familiarity may blunt appreciation, for they are picturesque without any minimising qualification. To the active and enterprising it is no difficult matter to climb the tall locked gate of the enclosure that keeps out the swarming mischievous children that come destructively up out of Hastings, and easy to avoid the plentiful nails and savage barbed wire that would induce others to seek the keys at Ore Place.