There is no landscape more profoundly tranquil—none more thoroughly English in character—than that which lies on either bank of the river below Henley-on-Thames. Between that town and the village of Hambleden—distant from each other some four miles, the Thames, flowing northwards first through the well-known Henley reach, bends sharply eastward and sweeps in a wide curve between level meadows, bordered and sheltered on the north by the beech-clad downs of Fawley and Hambleden. Southwards the view stretches away over Remenham, banded by heavy hedgerows, to the gently swelling uplands of Wargrave and Ashley. Just where the river-lawns are greenest and the stream spreads itself into its glassiest reach, stands, on the left bank, the modern house of Greenlands. A white building in the Italian style—surrounded by sleepy elms and solemn cedars casting broad swathes of shadow across the velvety turf, and gay with its environment of flower-beds led down to the very edge of the water—there is little in this place to commemorate the noisy conflict which once roared around it for months together. But there are still piled on the terrace some rusty round-shot, which from time to time have been found buried deep in the park and garden, memorials of the long siege sustained in old Greenland House by brave Sir John Doyley, who stood for the King in 1644. Oxford and Wallingford remained staunchly Royalist, but nearer Henley was garrisoned by the Parliamentarians, when, about the New Year, Doyley began to fortify his premises; and the Lenten lilies had not blown before he was closely beleaguered by Major-General Skippen.