Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/175

Rh gentleman in England. He has been a munificent benefactor to the town of Dudley. No man in the kingdom has done more for his immediate community in the same order of good will and good works. In the first place, he has given the town such a park as no one else had to give, if disposed to do it. It is the Castle Hill already noticed, with all its winding walks, weird caverns and gorges, and avenues between, low-arched with braided hawthorn branches, and whitened and perfumed with the sweet sheen and breath of their spring flowerage. Here are glens made by the pick centuries ago, now overshadowed by the white-armed birch and forest elm, with the interweaving of all the lower trees and shrubs known to the county. Here are look-outs on the thickly wooded edges of the eminence, with rustic seats from which you may get varying aspects of all The Black Country and its Green Border-Land. Then there are the gray and massive walls and towers and bastions of the old Castle, and the green, quiet courtyard within, as pleasant a place as could be for merry children to play and sing to the echoes of their happy voices, stirring the broken walls with the pulse of a new age's life. Never was there a better natural site for a romance, and I wonder some novelist has not made it the scene of one. Doubtless the moral material might be found in the history of the Dudley family.