And two large samplers with the usual pretty floral borders worked by Justinia’s daughters, signed “Alice Scholey, 1832, and Betsey Scholey, 1848.” The latter has some rather primitive representations of the old Hall and its two lodges; also the Vicarage and the School, and a libellous portrait of Lincoln Minster. Alice Scholey was of a more Scriptural turn of mind and apparently fond of birds, for she has owls in the centre of green bushes, and pheasants or peacocks among her flowers; but her central picture is the temptation, where Adam and Eve, worked in pink silk, _au naturel_, stand on either side of a goodly tree covered with fruit, a gorgeous serpent twining round the trunk, and one remarkably fine plum-coloured apple temptingly within reach of Eve’s hand. Certainly Justinia’s school was in advance of the time, but the art needlework doubtless owed much to the interest taken in it by Sarah Albinia, Countess of Ripon. Samplers of the eighteenth century are now much sought after. I saw one lately of 1791, on which a little mite of seven, in days when the “three R’s” were taught along with the use of the needle in the good old sensible way, had stitched in black silk letters:— The days were long The weather hot Sometimes I worked And sometimes not. Seven years my age Thoughtless and gay And often much Too fond of play. The first stanza with its pathetic little picture is genuine enough, but the second was manifestly dictated by her elders. [Sidenote: SAXON ORNAMENT] Among the treasures long preserved at Nocton was an Anglo-Saxon ornament of great beauty (see illustration, Chap. XXII) in which three discs of silver with a raised pattern of dragons, &c., and with pins four inches long are connected by silver links so as to form a cloak-chain to fasten the garment across the breast. The pins have shoulders an inch from the sharp points to prevent their shaking loose. This for a time was in a museum at Lincoln, and on the dispersal of the collection was bought and presented to the British Museum, and is in the Anglo-Saxon room. In the same room are kept the very interesting finds from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at _Sleaford_, consisting mainly of bronze ornaments and coloured beads. The cloak-chain was found in the Witham at _Fiskerton_, four miles from Lincoln, when the river was deepened in 1826. [Sidenote: THE MASQUERADE] Sir Charles Anderson, in his excellent Lincoln pocket guide, gives some notion of the gaiety which distinguished Nocton in the eighteenth century by quoting an account of a masquerade held there on December 29, 1767, which begins:— “Met at the door by a Turk, in a white Bearskin, who took our tickets.”