The practised eye speedily detects in the character and arrangement of a chamber something of its occupant. In some houses, the absence of all decoration, the simple puritanism of the furniture, bespeaks the life of quiet souls whose days are as devoid of luxury as their dwellings. You read in the cold grey tints the formal stiffness and unrelieved regularity around the Quaker-like flatness of their existence. In others, there is an air of ill-done display, a straining after effect, which shows itself in costly but ill-assorted details, a mingling of all styles and eras without repose or keeping. The bad pretentious pictures, the faulty bronzes, meagre casts of poor originals, the gaudy china, are safe warranty for the vulgarity of their owners; while the humble parlour of a village inn can be, as I have seen it, made to evidence the cultivated tastes and polished habits of those who have made it the halting-place of a day. We might go back and trace how much of our knowledge of the earliest ages is derived from the study of the interior of their dwellings; what a rich volume of information is conveyed in a mosaic; what a treatise does not lie in a frescoed wall! The room in which I now found myself was a long, and for its length a narrow, apartment; a range of tall windows, deeply sunk in the thick wall, occupied one side, opposite to which was a plain wall covered with pictures from floor to cornice, save where, at a considerable distance from one another, were two splendidly carved chimney-pieces of black oak, one representing ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds,’ and the other ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’--the latter done with a relief, a vigour, and a movement I have never seen equalled. Above these were some armorial trophies of an early date, in which, among the maces and battle-axes, I could recognise some weapons of Eastern origin, which by the family, I learned, were ascribed to the periods of the Crusades.