through the female line by the Touchets, Lords Audley of the present day. The other grandson, William, the son of Adam de Audithlegh, acquired with his wife the lordship of Thalck, better known as Talk o' th' Hill, in the same county. This William seems to have conceived a liking for the stony lea before referred to, and exchanged his lordship of Talk with his cousin for it. Thenceforward he made Stanley his seat, and, as the old chronicles tell us, in honour of his wife and of the great antiquity of her family, assumed her maiden name and became immediate founder of the Stanleys, a race the most illustrious in the country's annals, and associated with the most stirring events of history. Sir William Stanley, the fourth in descent from the William who first assumed the name, gave an impetus to the fortunes of the family by one of those matrimonial alliances to which the house of Stanley owes so much of its prosperity. He took to himself a wife in the person of Joan, the youthful daughter and co-heir of Sir Philip Bamville, master forester of Wirral, and lord of Storeton, a place some few miles south of Birkenhead. Associated with this match is a love story that in its romantic incidents is scarcely less interesting than the one related of the fair heiress of Haddon, Dorothy Vernon. The daughter of the house of Storeton had given her heart to young Stanley, and to escape the misery of a forced marriage with one for whom she had no love she determined to elope. While a banquet was being given to her father, she stole unobserved away, and, being joined by young William Stanley, the anxious lovers rode swiftly across the country to Astbury Church, and there, in the presence of Adam Hoton and Dawe Coupelond, plighted their troth to each other. Six hundred years have rolled away since that scene was enacted, but it requires little stretch of the imagination to picture the resolute maiden hastening with tremulous steps from her father's house, the exciting ride across country, and the hurried joining of hands and hearts in the old church at Astbury, and forgetting that all this occurred long ages ago, we wish from our hearts all happiness to the pair. The story is no mere legend, for the facts are to be found in those musty and unromantic records, the Cheshire Inquisitions, which have been unearthed, and their contents made accessible to the world, by the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records. In a return to a writ of enquiry as to the betrothal of William Stanley, the Inquisition sets forth--