We parted with the housekeeper, and I with a good many shillings, at the door by which we entered; and our next business was to see the private grounds and gardens.  A little boy attended us through the first part of our progress, but soon appeared the veritable gardener—­a shrewd and sensible old man, who has been very many years on the place.  There was nothing of special interest as concerning Byron until we entered the original old monkish garden, which is still laid out in the same fashion as the monks left it, with a large oblong piece of water in the center, and terraced banks rising at two or three different stages with perfect regularity around it; so that the sheet of water looks like the plate of an immense looking-glass, of which the terraces form the frame.  It seems as if, were there any giant large enough, he might raise up this mirror and set it on end.

In the monks’ garden, there is a marble statue of Pan, which the gardener told us, was brought by the “Wicked Lord” (great-uncle of Byron) from Italy, and was supposed by the country people to represent the devil, and to be the object of his worship—­a natural idea enough, in view of his horns and cloven feet and tail, tho this indicates at all events, a very jolly devil.  There is also a female statue, beautiful from the waist upward, but shaggy and cloven-footed below, and holding a little cloven-footed child by the hand.  This, the old gardener assured us was Pandora, wife of the above-mentioned Pan, with her son.  Not far from this spot, we came to the tree on which Byron carved his own name and that of his sister Augusta.  It is a tree of twin stems,—­a birch-tree, I think—­growing up side by side.  One of the stems still lives and flourished, but that on which he carved the two names is quite dead, as if there had been something fatal in the inscription that has made it for ever famous.  The names are still very legible, altho the letters had been closed up by the growth of the bark before the tree died.  They must have been deeply cut at first.

There are old yew-trees of unknown antiquity in this garden, and many other interesting things; and among them may be reckoned a fountain of very pure water, called the “Holly Well,” of which we drank.  There are several fountains, besides the large mirror in the center of the garden; and these are mostly inhabited by carp, the genuine descendants of those which peopled the fishponds in the days of the monks.  Coming in front of the Abbey, the gardener showed us the oak that Byron planted, now a vigorous young tree; and the monument which he erected to his Newfoundland dog, and which is larger than most Christians get, being composed of a marble, altar-shaped tomb, surrounded by a circular area of steps, as much as twenty feet in diameter.  The gardener said, however, that Byron intended this, not merely as the burial-place of his dog, but for himself, too, and his sister.

Hucknall-Torkard church [Footnote:  From “Gray Days and Gold.”  By permission of, and by arrangement with, the publishers, Moffat, Yard & Co.  Copyright by William Winter, 1890-1911.]