The chapel is modern, but richly and tastefully ornamented; and here, if the chaplain is absent, the lord of the house, according to ancient usage, reads divine service at ten o'clock every morning, at which all the family and servants must attend. The park is of considerable extent, but intersected by a troublesome number of fences, which serve to allot to the sheep, cows, horses and deer, their several territories. Of the latter, there are from four to five hundred head, which generally graze pretty near together like a herd of tame cattle, and do not answer at all to our idea of game.[17] The flesh too has a totally different flavour from that of the animals which roam free in our woods, just as they say the flesh of wild oxen differs from that of tame. The preserves for partridges and hares are also fenced in to protect the low copse from the cattle, in consequence of whose presence, the greater part of an English park consists, as I have already remarked, only of groups of high trees whose branches the cattle cannot reach. These extensive views, grand and striking as they are at first, become tiresome in time from their uniformity. Nor can I see that the numerous enclosures are advantages to the landscape. Almost every young tree has a fence round it to protect it from the cattle. Two temples and an obelisk, to which there is no other way than across the turf, have a very heterogeneous appearance in the midst of these pasture-grounds. The distant Gothic tower of Walden church, rearing its head picturesquely over the summits of the oaks, was in much better keeping. On the other hand I greatly admired the flower-garden and pheasantry. The first describes a large oval, surrounded with a thick natural evergreen wall of yew, laurel, rhododendron, cedar, cypress, box, holly, &c.; a brook, adorned with a grotto and water-fall, flows through the velvet turf, on which the rare and splendid plants and flower-beds of every form and colour group themselves most beautifully. The pheasantry, which is nearly two miles from this spot, is a thick shady grove of various sorts of trees, of considerable extent, and surrounded by a high wall. We could only get to it over the wet grass, as the gravel-walk commenced from the entrance-gate. This is from economy, for roads are excessively expensive both to make and to keep up in England. There is generally but one carriage-road to the house, and even the footpaths cease with the iron fences of the pleasure-grounds. The English ladies are not so afraid of setting their feet on wet grass as ours are.