point to many
distinguished members. Its ancestral seat is at Brome, in Suffolk.
This is a fine old mansion, and the hall, which is very lofty and open
to the roof, is an excellent specimen of the work of other days. The
chapel contains capital oak carving. In the village church there are
monuments worth notice of the family.

Following the fate of so many other places, Brome passed after the
death of the second marquis to a _novus homo_, one Matthias Kerrison,
who, having begun life as a carpenter, contrived in various ways to
acquire a colossal fortune. His son rose to distinction in the army,
obtained a seat in Parliament, which he held for thirty years, and was
created a baronet.

He left at his death a son and three daughters. The former, long
married, is childless. The sisters are respectively the wives of Earl
Stanhope, the well-known historian; Lord Henniker, a wealthy Suffolk
proprietor; and Lord Bateman. It is understood that under the late
baronet's will the son of the last will, in the event of the present
baronet dying childless, succeed to the property. It will thus be
observed that Brome, after having been for four centuries in one
family, is destined to change hands repeatedly in a few years.

When the second Marquis Cornwallis died sonless, the marquisate became
extinct, but the earldom passed to his first cousin. This nobleman,
by no means an able or admirable person, married twice. By his first
marriage he had a daughter, who married Charles Wykeham-Martin, Esq.,
M.P., whose father, by a concatenation of chances, became the owner
of Leeds Castle, near Maidstone, in Kent--a splendid moated baronial
pile, dating from the thirteenth century, but added to and improved
in admirable taste. Leeds was formerly the property of the Fairfax
family, whose chief, the present lord, resides near Washington. It
came to them from the once famous family of Colepepper.

Earl Cornwallis married a second time late in life, and had an only
daughter, Lady Julia. From that time his one idea seemed to be to
accumulate for this child, and accordingly at his death she was
the greatest heiress in England, her long minority serving to add
immensely to her father's hoards. Of course, when the time approached
for her entering society under the chaperonage of her cousins, the
marquis's daughters, speculation was very rife in the London world as
to whom she would marry, and many a mamma of high degree cast sheep's
eyes at the he