t, the contents of which were a curious mixture. Besides
great folio editions of the classics and the Christian Fathers, were
collections of the ephemeral literature of the days of Charles II,
notable among which were lampoons on Nell Gwyn and her royal
lover--works which the Archdeacon certainly never bought, and which must
have come to him through his mother from the Cavalier family of
Copplestone. In the hall was a marble table bearing a bust of
Demosthenes. In the drawing-room were watercolor drawings by artists
such as Prout and Stansfield; a group of Dutch paintings, including a
fine Van Ostade; sofas, on which Miss Austen might, have sat by the
Prince Regent; and scrap-work screens on which faded portraits and
landscapes were half eclipsed by quotations from _Elegant Extracts_.
From the drawing-room windows, in my mother's earlier days, might often
have been seen the figure of an old head gardener and factotum, George
Diggins by name, bending over beds of geraniums, who was born in the
reign of George II, who had passed his youth as a charcoal burner in
woods not far from Ugbrooke, the seat of the Catholic Cliffords, and who
often recounted how, on mysterious nights, "four horses and a coach,
with the old Lord Clifford inside it, would come tumbling out of the
woods into the road like so many packs of wool."

Dartington Hall--very well known to architects as the work of John
Holland, Duke of Exeter, in the reign of Richard II--passed by exchange
to the Champernownes in the reign of Henry VIII, and was originally an
enormous structure, inclosing two quadrangles. A large part of it, as
may be seen from old engravings, was falling into ruins in the days of
George II, but its principal feature was intact till the beginning of
the nineteenth century. This was one of the finest baronial halls in
England, seventy feet by forty, with a roof resembling that of the great
hall at Westminster. The roof, however, at that time showing signs of
impending collapse, it was taken down by my grandfather in the year
1810, and only the bare walls and the pointed windows remain. The
inhabited portion, however, is still of considerable extent, one of its
frontages--two hundred and thirty feet in length--abutting so closely on
a churchyard that the dead need hardly turn in their graves to peer in
through the lower windows at faded wall-papers, bedroom doors, and
endless yards of carpet. The interior, as I remember it, did not differ
fro