the hospitality of that chamber, because the sounds that he had heard, all around the place, throughout that night, were of a most startling description. A house containing many rooms and staircases, a house full of long corridors and winding ways, a house so large that you may get lost in it,--such is Clopton; and it stands in its own large park, removed from other buildings and bowered in trees. To sit in the great hall of that mansion, on a winter midnight, when the snow-laden wind is howling around it, and then to think of the bleak, sinister oratory, and the stealthy, gliding shapes upstairs, invisible to mortal eye, but felt, with a shuddering sense of some unseen presence watching in the dark,--this would be to have quite a sufficient experience of a haunted house. Sir Arthur Hodgson talked of the legends of Clopton with that merry twinkle of the eye which suits well with kindly incredulity. All the same, I thought of Milton's lines-- "Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep." The manor of Clopton was granted to John de Clopton by Peter de Montfort, in 1236, while Henry the Third was king, and the family of Clopton dwelt there for more than five hundred years. The Cloptons of Warwickshire and those of Suffolk are of the same family, and at Long Melford, in Suffolk, may be found many memorials of it. The famous Sir Hugh,--who built New Place in 1490, restored the Guild chapel, glazed the chancel of Stratford church, reared much of Clopton House, where he was visited by Henry the Seventh, and placed the bridge across the Avon at Stratford, where it still stands,--died in London, in 1496, and was buried at St. Margaret's, Lothbury. Joyce, or Jocasa, Clopton, born in 1558, became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, and afterwards to Queen Anne, wife of James the First, and ultimately married George Carew, created Earl of Totnes and Baron of Clopton. Carew, born in 1557, was the son of a Dean of Exeter, and he became the English commander-in-chief in Ireland, in the time of Elizabeth. King James ennobled him, with the title of Baron Clopton, in 1605, and Charles the First made him Earl of Totnes, in 1625. The Earl and his Countess are buried in Stratford church, where their marble effigies, recumbent in the Clopton pew, are among the finest monuments of that hallowed place. The Countess died in 1636, leaving no children, and the Earl thereupon caused all the estates that he had acquired by marriage with her to be restored to the Clopton family. Sir John Clopton, born in 1638, married the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Edward Walker, owner of Clopton in the time of Charles the Second, and it is interesting to remember that by him was built the well-known house at Stratford, formerly called the Shoulder of Mutton,[6] but more recently designated the Swan's Nest. Mention is made of a Sir John Clopton by whom the well