Neston church in this neighbourhood, the remains of three fine stone crosses were exhumed. A cross filled many uses, as has been said, but it was always contrived to make it an object of beauty to the neighbourhood. The Charing Cross that has been recently erected opposite the new hotel is one of the most successful that has been put up in modern days, and much resembles the roadside one at Waltham. From these old crosses proclamations used to be read, and tolls collected from the market people. The modern drinking-fountain also is an adaptation of the idea that suggested some of the crosses, and several of the old conduits might be copied with great advantage. The one at Sherborne, which has been illustrated in these pages, would be an excellent model for a drinking-fountain, and one that has not yet been copied. The covered market cross at Beverley is one of the last that was built, and answered the same purposes as those of Salisbury or Malmesbury. These were merely covered spaces for country people to rest in, in the heat and the rain, and generally connected with some religious house in the neighbourhood. They were usually octagonal and richly groined. That at Chichester is the most elaborate, though the more ancient one at Salisbury, engraved in page 119, is the most graceful and picturesque in the country. One thing strikes us in these crosses--the smallness of the accommodation for a public market; but then, as now, the market square was covered with awnings or tents. And one of the most picturesque sights in England is an old market square like the one at Hexham, or the one at Salisbury, with their booths, on a busy market-day. Sometimes a cross was built on an octagonal shaft surmounted with a crucifix, or a head with niches and small statues, and an octagonal covering was built up round it reaching to about half the height of the original shaft. This, as at Cheddar in Somerset, is sometimes of later date, and sometimes, as at Shepton-Mallet, in the same vicinity, built contemporaneously with the central column. In great numbers of villages we find flights of steps where a cross has once stood; but the eyesore being removed, the Puritans allowed the steps to remain. In Malpas these are of enormous dimensions, and when they were surmounted with a tall cross the effect in this picturesque little country town must have been most striking. As a rule, our modern representations of crosses have not been very successful; they are wanting in lightness and ingenuity. One mode of decoration, however, that is thoroughly unsuited to our climate, we are not likely to see renewed, and that is the gilding of crosses. The magnificent cross at Coventry was regilded in the reign of James II., and is said to have used up 15,403 books of gold.