On Sunday I of course went to church with the family:  a charming old church; tower of the time of Edward III.; some fine old monuments.  We merely walked through the park a distance of about the width of Washington Square, passed through a little door in the park wall, and there was the church just opposite.  It was Harvest Thanksgiving day, a festival recently introduced in England, in imitation of that which has come down to us from our Puritan forefathers.  There was a special service; and the church was very prettily drest with oats, flowers, grass, and grapes, the last being substituted for hops, as it was too late for them.  The offerings were for the Bulgarians; for everything now in England is tinged with the hue of “Turkish horrors.”

After service Lord ——­ took me to the chantry, where the tombs of the family are.  It was to show me a famous statue, that of a Lady ——­ and her baby, at the birth of which she died, it dying soon, too.  The statue is very beautiful, and is the most purely and sweetly pathetic work in sculpture that I ever saw.  It had a special interest for me because I remembered reading about it in my boyhood; but I had forgotten the name of the subject, and I had no thought of finding it here in a little country church.

Windsor [Footnote:  From “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands.”]

BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

About eleven o’clock we found ourselves going up the old stone steps to the castle.  It was the last day of a fair which had been holden in this part of the country, and crowds of the common people were flocking to the castle, men, women, and children pattering up the stairs before and after us.

We went first through the state apartments.  The principal thing that interested me was the ball room, which was a perfect gallery of Vandyke’s paintings.  Here was certainly an opportunity to know what Vandyke is.  I should call him a true court painter—­a master of splendid conventionalities, whose portraits of kings are the most powerful arguments for the divine right I know of.

The queen’s audience chamber is hung with tapestry representing scenes from the book of Esther.  This tapestry made a very great impression upon me.  A knowledge of the difficulties to be overcome in the material part of painting is undoubtedly an unsuspected element of much of the pleasure we derive from it; and for this reason, probably, this tapestry appeared to us better than paintings executed with equal spirit in oils.  We admired it exceedingly, entirely careless what critics might think of us if they knew it....

From the state rooms we were taken to the top of the Round Tower, where we gained a magnificent view of the Park of Windsor, with its regal avenue, miles in length, of ancient oaks; its sweeps of greensward; clumps of trees; its old Herne oak, of classic memory; in short, all that constitutes the idea of a perfect English landscape.  The English tree is shorter and stouter than ours; its foliage dense and deep, lying with a full, rounding outline against the sky.  Everything here conveys the idea of concentrated vitality, but without that rank luxuriance seen in our American growth.  Having unfortunately exhausted the English language on the subject of grass, I will not repeat any ecstasies upon that topic.