over two centuries," whereupon the lady made the unwelcome discovery that the factory in which it was produced only opened in 1850! Old worm-eaten oak from old houses pulled down and from old churches being restored is utilised in making careful copies of ancient Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture, so the wood of these is old enough and genuinely worm-eaten. I recently visited a village, through which motorists frequently pass, where there is a large curiosity shop literally crammed with "genuine" ancient furniture mostly made yesterday, but the copies I saw were so good and had such a look of ancientness as to deceive many an innocent purchaser. Two "monks' tables" were on sale there, suits and bits of rusty and knightly armour, made I fancy, in spite of the easily obtained rust, not more than a dozen years or so ago in Germany, where they do the thing very well, old sun-dials, old dressers, Elizabethan chairs, early water-clocks and bracket clocks of the Cromwell era, and I know not what else; all most cleverly reproduced even to the signs of wear--done by a wire brush, I believe--and the cutting of initials and dates of centuries past on tables and chairs. A gentleman who had been to Japan told me that he discovered a craftsman there who was most clever in reproducing old brass Cromwell clocks, works and all, even to the English makers' names and ancient dates upon them; these were sent over to England, and he showed me one that he had purchased, and so skilfully was the original imitated, even to the presumed wear of the works, that I was astounded at the cleverness of the fraud. But to return to the vestry of Tong church, said the clerk to me, "Have you heard of the Great Bell of Tong?" I had not till he mentioned it. I waited for him to tell its story that I knew was coming. I have forgotten how much he declared it weighed, but I believe it was considerably over two tons. "It takes three men to start it," he went on, "but when once started one man can keep it going. It was presented to the church in 1518 by Sir Henry Vernon. It is only rung on Christmas Day, Easter Day, Whit-Sunday, and St. Bartholomew's Day, on the birth of a child to the Sovereign and an heir to the Prince of Wales, or when the head of the Vernon family visits Tong." Dickens confessed that it was to Tong church that he brought Little Nell with the schoolmaster in the _Old Curiosity Shop_, and this is how he describes it: "It was a very aged, ghostly place; the church had been built many hundred years ago, and once had a convent or a monastery attached," referring doubtless to the decayed College, "for arches in ruins, remains of oriel windows, and fragments of blackened walls, were yet standing; while other portions of the old buildings, which had crumbled away and fallen down, were mingled with the churchyard earth and overgrown with grass, as though they too claimed a burial-place, and sought to mix their ashes with the dust of men."