Page:Ethel Churchill 2.pdf/233

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ETHEL CHURCHILL.
231

rich and glowing wreath, when all beside is desolate: so frail, too, and so delicate, like a fairy emblem of those sweet and gentle virtues whose existence is first known in an hour of adversity. High brick walls stand where once stood that rosy and graceful tree; and if there be one object more dreary than another, it is a high, blank brick wall: as little vestige is there left of the wide-spread common. Small houses have sprung up as rapidly as the summer grasses used to spring in the Five Fields, so notorious for robbery and murder, that even Madame de Genlis, not usually very accurate in her English locale, is perfectly right in making them the scene of a robber's attack.

"Troy now stands where grass once grew," to take the liberty of reversing a quotation, and Belgrave Square has effaced the terrors of "The Five Fields;" but the road to Sir Robert Walpole's lay more to the right; yet so much are places brought together, and distances shortened now-a-days, that a visit to Chelsea was about what a visit to Richmond would be now. It was a very pleasant morn-