The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present surroundings.  The Thames flows from the castle and the school under two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert bridges; and when, turning our back upon Staines, just below Runnymede, with its boundary-stone marking the limit of the jurisdiction of plebeian London’s fierce democracy, and inscribed “God preserve the City of London, 1280,” we strike west into the Great Park, we soon come plump on George III, a great deal larger than life.  The “best farmer that ever brushed dew from lawn” is clad in antique costume with toga and buskins.  Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no bridle to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the distance while his steed is in the act of stepping over a perpendicular precipice.  This preposterous effort of the glyptic art has the one merit of serving as a finger-board.  The old king points us to his palace, three miles off, at the end of the famous Long Walk.  He did not himself care to live at the castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge in the park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy ride to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for medical attendance from London, and to which he returned a few months later restored for the time.  Shortly after his recovery he undertook to throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but found it nailed down.  He asked the cause, and was told, with inconsiderate bluntness, that it had been done during his illness to prevent his doing himself an injury.  The perfect calmness and silence with which he received this explanation was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.

[Illustration:  ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.]

Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the direction of his brazen hand and take up the line of march, wherein all traveling America has preceded us, to the point wherefrom we glanced off so suddenly in obedience to the summons of Magna Charta.  On either hand, as we thread the Long Walk, open glades that serve as so many emerald-paved courts to the monarchs of the grove, some of them older than the whole Norman dynasty, with Saxon summers recorded in their hearts.  One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is called after the Conqueror.  Among these we shall not find the most noted of Windsor trees.  It was in the Home Park, on the farther or northern side of the castle, that the fairies were used to perform their

    —­dance of custom round about the oak
  Of Herne the hunter.