certain intervals of from three to seven years, and various portions of the woods are cleared successively, instead of being all bared at once. Then, too, tracts are carefully planted with forest trees at proper distances, and these future groves fenced in, while in formerly neglected plantations the useless timber is thinned out and room given the older trees to grow and spread. The planting of lawns and pleasure-grounds with foreign specimen trees is one of the greatest delights of an English country gentleman, and the acres of young wellingtonias, diodaras, araucarias (or monkey-puzzlers—so named from their spiky leaves, that defy a monkey's climbing powers), various American pines and oaks, catalpas, tulip trees, etc., etc., are as much his pride as a flower-garden or a poultry-yard is the favorite hobby of his wife. Mostyn, however, well surrounded by trees, could afford to dispense with that attraction, considering its family museum and its valuable library of old British history and poetry. The Welsh manuscripts are a treasure in themselves, and a silver harp which has been in the family for more than three centuries is shown with as much pride as the pedigree, which occupies nearly fifty feet of parchment. The old family armor is also interesting. Among purely historical relics is a golden torque, or neck-band, worn by the princes of Wales in ancient times. Some of the royal jewelry of the Irish kings in the museum at Dublin, and one or two specimens I have seen at a private collector's near London, have much the same shape and general appearance, and the plaid-brooches now in common use in Scotland are not unlike the old pins for fastening cloaks of which these museums, public and private, are full.

OLD EPISCOPAL PALACE, CHESTER.

The road from Mostyn onward passes through Northup, whose high church-tower, encircled with strongly-defined bands of cusped work, is a very prominent object in one of the loveliest landscapes of the Dee. In some parts of the road oaks meet overhead for long distances, and between the trunks the views of the undulating cultivated fields, studded with broad tall trees, are continually changing. At high water there is a kind of likeness here to the scenery of the English lakes, though the mountains there are nearer and better defined; but at low water the Dutch likeness breaks out again, and the low-lying fields of wheat and hay melt away in the distance into vast flat sandbanks. Near Northup are Halkin Castle, a house of the duke of Westminster, formal and black, but with fine grounds and park, and Upper Soughton Hall, belonging to Mr. Howard—a low, irregular, gabled building in the style of Mostyn, gray and time-worn, and very attractive. Nearing Hawarden, the road passes by (but does not lead to) the ruins of Ewloc Castle, a place whose history is very slightly known, but whose walls, eight feet thick, and curious staircase, approached by a small gateway and enclosed in the wall, lead to more speculation than other and better-known places. Its odd situation in a deep, gloomy dell, suggestive, as Dean Howson says, of a Canadian forest-glen, is another attraction. Most ruins, castles especially, are conspicuous objects on hilltops or open plains. Ewloc is like some of the natural beauties of the Lake country, for a sight of which you have to climb steep slippery paths or go down rocky declines with fern on their glistening edges, lean over frail parapets, and cross bridges almost as swinging in their miniature proportions as the famous rope-bridges of Peru. The tall elms and beech trees that shroud Heron Bridge, belonging to Mr. Charles Potts, mark one of the most delightful of the Dee scenes. The house, a very unpretending one, is a statelier counterpart of Erbistock, with its double terraces, broken by flights of steps leading down to the water's edge. Netherlegh, once the home of an old extinct Chester family, the Cotgreaves, almost leans on one of the lodges of Eaton Hall, opposite which, but nearly two miles from the river, is Saighton Tower, formerly a country-house of the abbots of St. Werburgh, and already in earlier times held by the secular canons of that church, to whom the Domesday survey secured it for another half century. Of course it is a good deal altered now. By Bangor we pass a group of old historic houses, each still in the hands of the family that built or inherited it centuries ago—among others, Acton Hall, the birthplace of Judge Jeffreys; then some newer houses, one of which, a large one in the Italian style, belongs to Mr. Edmund Peel, one of the greatest land-owners of the neighborhood. Knolton Hall, near Erbistock, is one of the most beautiful of country-houses, yet not one that has a history as such. It shows what taste can do. Its front is black and white, the timber showing outside, as in many of the southern Cheshire and Shropshire houses, and its low, broad-capped tower, its dozen or so of gables, its stacks of twisted and carved chimneys, give it a very English and home look. How much of the old original farmhouse remains one can hardly tell. Mr. Cotton, brother of Lord Combermere, the Peninsular hero, bought the estate when the place was in a half-ruined condition, but saw that the house had great capabilities. I have known such a restoration, on a smaller scale, to be as successful, when the large kitchen was turned into a drawing-room, ingeniously pieced on to a new and large alcove opening by a glass door on to the flower-garden, and communicating by a tower staircase with the chapel beside it and the "boudoir" up stairs; which room had a mullioned oriel window over the glass door. A library, study and second drawing-room were made out of the existing rooms down stairs, while the oldest part of the house, an ivied square tower with an orthodox ghost-story, was turned into schoolroom and nursery; and on a lower level (a feature which made the hall quite different from any I ever saw in a large or a small house) were built out a covered stone porch, a dining-room with mullioned bay-window and a stone mantelpiece receding to the ceiling, and guarded by two carved lions bearing shields, and a line of servants' offices enclosing a courtyard and a spring of famous water.

BRIDGE STREET ROW, CHESTER.

Eaton Hall, the coldly magnificent pile of which we spoke before, has its rival in Wynnestay, the house of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, the largest landowner in Wales. No doubt the old house, burnt down in 1858, was less grand, but the loss of its collections of heirlooms, all things of historical and national interest to a Welshman, was a worse one than that of the building itself. Pennant, in his Tour in Wales nearly a century ago, describes it with the same comments on domestic arrangements as many of our architects now start on as guiding principles: "The most ancient part is a gateway of wood and plaster, dated 1616. On a tower within the court is this excellent distich, allusive to the name of the house, Wynne stay, or 'Rest satisfied with the good things Providence has so liberally showered on you:'

The new part, built by the first Sir Watkin, is of itself a good house, yet was only a portion of a more extensive design. It is finished in that substantial yet neat manner becoming the seat of an honest English country gentleman, adapted to the reception of his worthy neighbors, who may