When, tired of even so charming a scene of arboreal luxury, we knock at the Flower-Pot gate to the left of the palace, and are admitted into the private garden, we make the acquaintance of another stately stranger we have had the honor at home of meeting only under glass.  This is the great vine, ninety years or a hundred old, of the Black Hamburg variety.  It does not cover as much space as the Carolina Scuppernong—­the native variety that so surprised and delighted Raleigh’s Roanoke Island settlers in 1585—­often does.  But its bunches, sometimes two or three thousand in number, are much larger than the Scuppernong’s little clumps of two or three.  They weigh something like a pound each, and are thought worthy of being reserved for Victoria’s dessert.  Her own family vine has burgeoned so broadly that three thousand pounds of grapes would not be a particularly large dish for a Christmas dinner for the united Guelphs.

[Illustration:  Gate to private garden.]

We must not forget the Labyrinth, “a mighty maze, but not without a plan,” that has bewildered generations of young and old children since the time of its creator, William of Orange.  It is a feature of the Dutch style of landscape gardening imprinted by him upon the Hampton grounds.  He failed to impress a like stamp upon that chaos of queer, shapeless and contradictory means to beneficent ends, the British constitution.

Hampton Court, notwithstanding the naming of the third quadrangle the Fountain Court, and the prominence given to a fountain in the design of the principal grounds, is not rich in waterworks.  Nature has done a good deal for it in that way, the Thames embracing it on two sides and the lowness of the flat site placing water within easy reach everywhere.  This superabundance of the element did not content the magnificent Wolsey.  He was a man of great ideas, and to secure a head for his jets he sought an elevated spring at Combe Wood, more than two miles distant.  To bring this supply he laid altogether not less than eight miles of leaden pipe weighing twenty-four pounds to the foot, and passing under the bed of the Thames.  Reduced to our currency of to-day, these conduits must have cost nearly half a million of dollars.  They do their work yet, the gnawing tooth of old Edax rerum not having penetrated far below the surface of the earth.  Better hydraulic results would now be attained at a considerably reduced cost by a steam-engine and stand-pipe.  At the beginning of the sixteenth century this motor was not even in embryo, unless we accept the story of Blasco de Garay’s steamer that manoeuvred under the eye of Charles V. as fruitlessly as Fitch’s and Fulton’s before Napoleon.  Coal, its dusky pabulum, was also practically a stranger on the upper Thames.  The ancient fire-dogs that were wont to bear blazing billets hold their places in the older part of the palace.

[Illustration:  Bushy park.]