Windsor Castle, which everybody knows, or can easily learn, all about, is one of the largest of those huge caverns in which the descendants of the original cave men, when they have reached the height of human grandeur, delight to shelter themselves.  It seems as if such a great hollow quarry of rock would strike a chill through every tenant, but modern improvements reach even the palaces of kings and queens, and the regulation temperature of the castle, or of its inhabited portions, is fixed at sixty-five degrees of Fahrenheit.  The royal standard was not floating from the tower of the castle, and everything was quiet and lonely.  We saw all we wanted to,—­pictures, furniture, and the rest.  My namesake, the Queen’s librarian, was not there to greet us, or I should have had a pleasant half-hour in the library with that very polite gentleman, whom I had afterwards the pleasure of meeting in London.

After going through all the apartments in the castle that we cared to see, or our conductress cared to show us, we drove in the park, along the “three-mile walk,” and in the by-roads leading from it.  The beautiful avenue, the open spaces with scattered trees here and there, made this a most delightful excursion.  I saw many fine oaks, one about sixteen feet of honest girth, but no one which was very remarkable.  I wished I could have compared the handsomest of them with one in Beverly, which I never look at without taking my hat off.  This is a young tree, with a future before it, if barbarians do not meddle with it, more conspicuous for its spread than its circumference, stretching not very far from a hundred feet from bough-end to bough-end.  I do not think I saw a specimen of the British Quercus robur of such consummate beauty.  But I know from Evelyn and Strutt what England has to boast of, and I will not challenge the British oak.

Two sensations I had in Windsor park, or forest, for I am not quite sure of the boundary which separates them.  The first was the lovely sight of the hawthorn in full bloom.  I had always thought of the hawthorn as a pretty shrub, growing in hedges; as big as a currant bush or a barberry bush, or some humble plant of that character.  I was surprised to see it as a tree, standing by itself, and making the most delicious roof a pair of young lovers could imagine to sit under.  It looked at a little distance like a young apple-tree covered with new-fallen snow.  I shall never see the word hawthorn in poetry again without the image of the snowy but far from chilling canopy rising before me.  It is the very bower of young love, and must have done more than any growth of the forest to soften the doom brought upon man by the fruit of the forbidden tree.  No wonder that

  “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of
  love,”

with the object of his affections awaiting him in this boudoir of nature.  What a pity that Zekle, who courted Huldy over the apples she was peeling, could not have made love as the bucolic youth does, when