And Charles Hoar's house is with us to this
day, quaintly gabled, and with over-handing timber-framed
stories, such as the Romans built here in the first century.
It stands in Longsmith Street, just above the spot where forty
years ago I looked down on a beautiful tessellated pavement
of, perhaps, the time of Valentinian. It was eight feet below
the present surface; for Gloucester, like Rome, has been
a rising city.
Senator Hoar had been making his headquarters at Malvern,
and he drove over from there one afternoon, with a view to
our going on in the same carriage to the Forest. A better
plan would have been to run by rail to Newnham or Lydney,
to be met by a carriage from the "Speech House," a government
hotel in the centre of the woods; but as the arrangement had
been made we let it stand.
To give a general idea of the positions of the places we
are dealing with, I may say that Upton Knoll, where I am
writing, stands on the steep edge of a spur of the Cotteswold
Hills, three and a half miles south of Gloucester. Looking
north, we have before us the great vale, or rather plain,
of the Severn, bounded on the right by the main chain of the
Cotteswolds, rising to just over one thousand feet; and on
the left by the hills of Herefordshire, and the beautiful
blue peaks of the Malverns; these last being by far the most
striking feature in the landscape, rising as they do in a
sharp serrated line abruptly from the plain below.
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