adorning the staircase, representing Hercules, the Furies, and various
knights in armour. We give an illustration of the staircase newel in
Cromwell House, Highgate, with its quaint little figure of a man
standing on a lofty pedestal.

[Illustration: Elizabethan Chest, in the possession of Sir Coleridge
Grove, K.C.B. Height, 2 ft. 11 in.; length, 5 ft. 2 in.]

Sometimes one comes across strange curiosities in old houses, the odds
and ends which Time has accumulated. On p. 201 is a representation of
a water-clock or clepsydra which was made at Norwich by an ingenious
person named Parson in 1610. It is constructed on the same principle
as the timepieces used by the Greeks and Romans. The brass tube was
filled with water, which was allowed to run out slowly at the
bottom. A cork floated at the top of the water in the tube, and as it
descended the hour was indicated by the pointer on the dial above.
This ingenious clock has now found its way into the museum in Norwich
Castle. The interesting contents of old houses would require a volume
for their complete enumeration.

In looking at these ancient buildings, which time has spared us, we
seem to catch a glimpse of the Lamp of Memory which shines forth in
the illuminated pages of Ruskin. The men, our forefathers, who built
these houses, built them to last, and not for their own generation. It
would have grieved them to think that their earthly abode, which had
seen and seemed almost to sympathize in all their honour, their
gladness or their suffering--that this, with all the record it bare of
them, and of all material things that they had loved and ruled over,
and set the stamp of themselves upon--was to be swept away as soon as
there was room made for them in the grave. They valued and prized the
house that they had reared, or added to, or improved. Hence they loved
to carve their names or their initials on the lintels of their doors
or on the walls of their houses with the date. On the stone houses of
the Cotswolds, in Derbyshire, Lancashire, Cumberland, wherever good
building stone abounds, you can see these inscriptions, initials
usually those of husband and wife, which preserved the memorial of
their names as long as the house remained in the family. Alas! too
often the memorial conveys no meaning, and no one knows the names they
represent. But it was a worthy feeling that prompted this building for
futurity. There is a mystery about the inscription recorded in the
ill