an exoneration from church-going.  But in the afternoon, the prospective interval between lunch and tea assuming formidable proportions, my host took me out to walk, and in the course of our walk he led me into a park which he described as “the paradise of a small English country gentleman.”  Well it might be:  I have never seen such a collection of oaks.  They were of high antiquity and magnificent girth and stature:  they were strewn over the grassy levels in extraordinary profusion, and scattered upon and down the slopes in a fashion than which I have seen nothing more charming since I last looked at the chestnut trees on the banks of the Lake of Como.  It appears that the place was not very vast, but I was unable to perceive its limits.  Shortly before we turned into the park the rain had renewed itself, so that we were awkwardly wet and muddy; but, being near the house, my companion proposed to leave his card in a neighborly way.  The house was most agreeable:  it stood on a kind of terrace in the midst of a lawn and garden, and the terrace looked down on one of the handsomest rivers in England, and across to those blue undulations of which I have already spoken.  On the terrace also was a piece of ornamental water, and there was a small iron paling to divide the lawn from the park.  All this I beheld in the rain.  My companion gave his card to the butler, with the observation that we were too much bespattered to come in; and we turned away to complete our circuit.  As we turned away I became acutely conscious of what I should have been tempted to call the cruelty of this proceeding.  My imagination gauged the whole position.  It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was raining.  The house was charming, the terrace delightful, the oaks magnificent, the view most interesting.  But the whole thing was—­not to repeat the epithet “dull,” of which just now I made too gross a use—­the whole thing was quiet.  In the house was a drawing-room, and in the drawing-room was—­by which I meant must be—­a lady, a charming English lady.  There was, it seemed to me, no fatuity in believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not please her to be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to her door only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card.  Therefore, when, before we had gone many yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us, I felt how just my sentiment of the situation had been.  Of course we went back, and I carried my muddy shoes into the drawing-room—­just the drawing-room I had imagined—­where I found—­I will not say just the lady I had imagined, but—­a lady even more charming.  Indeed, there were two ladies, one of whom was staying in the house.  In whatever company you find yourself in England, you may always be sure that some one present is “staying.”  I seldom hear this participle now-a-days without remembering an observation made to me in France by a lady who had seen much of English manners:  “Ah, that dreadful word staying! I think we are so