excepting the stone Elizabethan tower, it is "magpie," or black and white, like so many of the old Cheshire halls and ancient manor-houses. An epitaph in the graveyard is not without suggestiveness:-- Peaceable Mary Fairbrother, 1766. Aged 90. For the return walk there is a cheerful route through fields and lanes to Knutsford, entering the town behind the prison; or, for variety, there is Lostock Gralam station. Pushing a few miles further, we find ourselves at Northwich, a place at which there is little occasion to delay, unless it be wished to inspect one of the salt mines, permission to do so being asked previously of the proprietors. At Whitsuntide the public are in a certain sense invited, and truly, a more interesting and wonderful spectacle than is furnished by the Marston mine it would be hard to provide for holiday pleasure. But at present we are seeking enjoyment upon the surface, and to this end the journey should now be continued to Hartford, the station for Vale Royal. "Vale Royal" is essentially the name of the immense expanse of beautiful, though nearly level, country over which the eye ranges when we stand amid the ruins of Beeston Castle. It is still worthy of the praise lavished on it in 1656. "The ayre of Vale Royall," says the old historian of that date, "is verie wholesome, insomuch that the people of the country are seldom infected with Disease or Sicknesse, neither do they use the help of Physicians, nothing so much, as in other countries. For when any of them are sick, they make him a posset, and tye a kerchief on his head; and if that will not amend him, then God be mercifull to him! The people there live to be very old: some are Grandfathers, their fathers yet living, and some are Grandfathers before they be married.... They be very gentle and courteous, ready to help and further one another; in Religion very zealous, howbeit somewhat addicted to Superstition: otherwise stout, bold, and hardy: withal impatient of wrong, and ready to resist the Enemy or Stranger that shall invade their country.... Likewise be the women very friendly and loving, in all kind of Housewifery expert, fruitful in bearing Children after they be married, and sometimes before.... I know divers men which are but farmers that may compare therein with a Lord or Baron in some Countreys beyond the Seas."--A considerable portion of this great expanse is represented in the still current appellation of Delamere Forest,--a term not to be understood as meaning that it was at any time covered by timber-trees, either indigenous or planted, but that it was "outside," _ad foras_, a wild, uncultivated and comparatively barren tract as opposed to districts that were well farmed and sprinkled plentifully with habitations. Trees there were, doubtless, and in abundance, but the _bonâ fide_ woods occupied only a part of the "forest" in the aggregate. An idea of such a forest as Delamere was in the olden time is very easily formed. We