_I could set forth the truth touching some of those inner tragedies, now legendary, that the warlike walls once witnessed after the first Tudor had restored the estate of Bindon to the last descendant of its rightful owner, a Cheveral, whereby the line of Bindon-Cheveral joined on the older branch.—There was the Agnes Cheveral of the ballad singers—“so false and fair”—who left the tradition of poison in the wine cup as a fate to be dreaded by the Lords of Bindon.—And there was the Sir Richard who kept his childless wife a life-long prisoner in the topmost chamber of that keep now so placidly dreaming under its creepers!_ _Or I could reel you a bustling Restoration narrative of the doing of the Edmund Cheveral known in the family as Edmund the Spendthrift, who had roamed England, hunted and fasting, with Charles; had stagnated with him, had junketed and roystered in Holland. He it was who brought over the shrewish little French wife and her great fortune, and also foreign notions of display, to old English Bindon. He it was who pulled down the gloomy loopholed walls, built the present House, laid out the park and the renowned gardens; who introduced the carp into the pacific moat after the fashion of French châteaux; and who, bitten with fanciful scientific aspiration—a friend of Rupert and a member of the Royal Society—laid out in a sunken and wall-sheltered part of the old fortified ground an inner pleasaunce of exotic plants and shrubs, after the manner of Dutch Physick-Gardens._ _Or would you have the story of the new heir—a silent, dark man—and of his mystic Welsh wife and of the new wealth and strain of blood that came with her into the race? Or again, no doubt for those who care to hear the call of horn and hounds, to see the port pass over the mahogany; who find your three-bottle man the best company and the jokes of the stable and of the gun-room the only ones worth cracking with the walnut, there were a pleasant rollicking chapter or two to be chronicled anent the generation of fox-hunting, hard-living Squires who kept Bindon prosperous, made its cellars celebrated and its hospitality a byword._ _And yet, my fancy lingers upon the spot where it was first awakened; dwells on the story of the deserted Physick-Garden, with its closed exquisitely-wrought gate, its mystery and its melancholy; with its wildness wherein lies no hint of sordidness, but rather a fascinating, elusive beauty. It is of this that I fain would write._ _Standing barred out, in this still autumn twilight, as the first stars flash out faintly on the deepening vault; gazing upon its overgrown paths, where the leaves of so many summers make rich mould; inhaling its strange fragrances, the scent of the wholesome decay of nature mixed with odd spices that come from far lands; hearing the wild birds cry as they fly free in its imprisoned space—it seems to me as if the spirit of my romance dwelt in these, and I could evoke it._