Many are the tales the old people at Eversley used to tell of the "gentlemen of the road" in their fathers' and grandfathers' time. Even in quiet Eversley itself a curate lived some hundred years ago whose strange career ended on the gallows. He owned a splendid black horse which no one ever saw him mount. But it was whispered that if any one peeped into its stable in the morning the beautiful creature was seen covered with foam, bathed in perspiration, trembling as if it had just come in from a long gallop; and at last it was found out that Parson Darby belonged to the gang of highwaymen on Bagshot Heath. He was caught red-handed, and hanged close to the Golden Farmer in chains on a gibbet of which the posts were still standing forty years ago. But what became of his black horse no one ever could tell me. Now the London road is as safe and quiet as any other well-kept highway, and the wildest passengers upon it are a few wandering gypsies, who travel up and down it from fair to race and from race to fair.
But Reynard is speeding away through the pleasant fir woods, and we are following him as fast as we can lay legs to ground--scrambling over the rotten banks, scurrying along the soft rides, lying low on our saddles to avoid the sweeping boughs, and watching with all our eyes for the slippery roots that crawl along the surface of the sandy soil. Down through the bogs, across the bridge by the home farm, past the park, into the fallow fields, with half a dozen tremendous fences which send my heart up into my throat till Sintram lands me safe over each, into the fir woods again, up to the foot of the Queen's Mounts; and there, where good Queen Bess sat and watched the deer being driven up to her feet, do we run into our gallant fox, and a "Whoo-hoop!" from Tom proclaims that Reynard is no more.
But our run has led us far from home, and while the hounds trot on to Dogmersfield Park to draw the coverts of the descendants of the old regicide Mildmay, let us wend our way once more to Bramshill and linger a while longer about the terraces and gardens of the dear old house.
Come back with me, gentle reader, through the iron gates under the crumbling archways of the pleasaunce, where the Virginia creeper twines its delicate wreaths and glorifies the old stones in autumn with a flush of flame. The troco-ground, with its green turf as smooth as a billiard-table, is just as it was in the days of King James. There in the centre is the iron ring through which the lords and dames drove the heavy wooden troco-balls; and if you go into the garden-hall through that arched corridor you will see the actual balls that they used, and the long poles, with a kind of iron cup at their ends, with which the players pushed them--forerunners of the modern croquet-box that lies beside them.