the last-named sold the estate to Frederick, Duke of York, the son of George III. and Commander-in-Chief of the British army.  Soon afterwards the house at Oatlands was destroyed by fire, and the prince erected a new building, some portions of which are incorporated in the present hostelry.  A pathetic interest attaches to those remains of York House.  Within those walls were spent many of the honeymoon hours of a fair and virtuous princess, one whose early death plunged England into the deepest grief it had known for centuries; there she conceived the child who in the ordinary course of nature might have become King of Great Britain.  But the babe, so anxiously awaited by the whole nation (there was no Princess Victoria at that time) proved stillborn; and of the unhappy ‘mother of the moment,’ Byron wrote in immortal lines: 

     Of sackcloth was thy wedding garment made;
       Thy bridal’s fruit is ashes; in the dust
     The fair-hair’d Daughter of the Isles is laid,
     The love of millions!

I am bound to add that the tragic story of the Princess Charlotte was not that which most appealed to M. Zola’s feelings at Oatlands Park.  Nor was he particularly impressed by the far-famed grotto which the hotel handbook states ‘has no parallel in the world.’  The grotto, an artificial affair, the creation of which is due to a Duke of Newcastle, whom it cost 40,000 pounds, besides giving employment to three men for twenty years, consists of numerous chambers and passages, whose walls are inlaid with coloured spars, shells, coral, ammonites, and crystals.  This work is ingenious enough, but when one enters a bath-room and finds a stuffed alligator there, keeping company with a statue of Venus and a terra-cotta of the infant Hercules, one is apt to remember how perilously near the ridiculous is to the sublime.

Ridiculous also to some minds may seem the Duchess of York’s dog and monkey cemetery, in which half a hundred of that lady’s canine and simian pets lie buried with headstones to their tombs commemorating their virtues.  This cemetery, however, greatly commended itself to M. Zola, who, as some may know, is a rare lover of animals.  Among the various distinctions accorded to him in happier times by his compatriots there is none that he has ever prized more highly than the diploma of honour he received from the French ‘Society for the Protection of Animals,’ and I believe that one of the happiest moments he ever knew was when, as Government delegate at a meeting of that society, he fastened a gold medal on the bosom of a blushing little shepherdess, a certain Mlle. Camelin, of Trionne, in Upper Burgundy, a girl of sixteen, who, at the peril of her life, had engaged a ravenous wolf in single combat, killed him, and thereby saved her flock.

And M. Zola’s books teem with his love of animals.  During his long exile one of the few requests addressed to him from France, to which he inclined a favourable ear, was an appeal on behalf of a new journal devoted to the interests of the animal world.  To this he could not refuse his patronage, and he gave it enthusiastically, well knowing how much remains to be accomplished in inculcating among the masses such affection and patience as are rightful with regard to those dumb creatures who serve man so well.