by a partition boarding, and a fine mantlepiece,
with figures in relief, being built half over, and gas-jets thrust
through the moulding. They showed me a great open hearth, with decorated
mantle, which must have been that of the dining-room; at present the room
is used for lumber. Half of it has been pulled down to build a
staircase, and the low casement windows are blocked by a lean-to
coalshed, making the room so dark that I could barely see the plaster
modelling of the wall.

This, I confess, is a vandalism, but I still consider it as the necessary
penalty we pay for not putting all the treasures of our past into
museums, labelling them neatly--and never looking at them.

The Penrose Almshouses in Litchdon Street, a beautiful small quadrangle,
with a low colonnade surmounted by an ornamented lead gutter and steep
dormer windows in a red-tiled roof, are still kept to their old uses.
They stand the wear and tear of time as well as its mellowing, and, like
language, if they are here and there vulgarized by the usage of every
day, without it they would be a dead language.

Queen Anne's Walk, overlooking the river, and close to the town station,
is a small colonnade of the Renaissance style, which is most familiar to
us in the architecture of Bath; it has an outlandish look, with its
classical lines seen against the background of the smooth river and green
Devonshire country, and has not the homely charm of Elizabethan or Stuart
building.

It has, however, its peculiar beauty; it is suggestive of red-heeled
shoes and powder, and an artificial world of beaux and belles. It must
have been a pleasant enough place to walk in, until the railway came
between it and the river, and its earlier name of the Merchants' Walk (or
the Exchange) gives more of its character than its present name.

One must beware, however, in the present popular quest for the "antique,"
of overlooking the beauty of modern things; the market, for instance,
which is a vast rectangular building standing on the High Street, has a
strange and individual charm when you come into it out of the glare of
the white street. The windows are fitted with light green glass, which
gives a sort of ghostly twilight to its bare spaciousness, with heavy
masses of gloom among the pillars of the flanking colonnade. It has no
pretence to artistic ornament of any kind; it was built for a specific
purpose, which it answers admirably, and when it is crowded with stalls