The Judges came back
to Westminster. London was alive again--alive and healed; basking in the
sunshine of Royalty.
Nowhere was London more alive in the month of March than at Fareham
House on the Thames, where the Fareham liveries of green and gold showed
conspicuous upon his lordship's watermen, lounging about the stone steps
that led down to the water, or waiting in the terraced garden, which was
one of the finest on the river. Wherries of various weights and sizes
filled one spacious boathouse, and in another handsome stone edifice with
a vaulted roof Lord Fareham's barge lay in state, glorious in cream colour
and gold, with green velvet cushions and Oriental carpets, as splendid as
that blue-and-gold barge which Charles had sent as a present to Madame, a
vessel to out-glitter Cleopatra's galley, when her ladyship and her friends
and their singing-boys and musicians filled it for a voyage to Hampton
Court.
The barge was used on festive occasions, or for country voyages, as to
Hampton or Greenwich; the wherries were in constant requisition. Along
that shining waterway rank and fashion, commerce and business, were moving
backwards and forwards all day long. That more novel mode of transit, the
hackney coach, was only resorted to in foul weather; for the Legislature
had handicapped the coaching trade in the interests of the watermen, and
coaches were few and dear.
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