The other ecclesiastical objects of the town were duly visited, and then I took a boat on the Dee, and was rowed toward Eaton Hall, which I finally reached on foot, after a walk through the surrounding park. This was, till very lately, regarded as the finest possible specimen of modern Gothic, in the domestic line, and a vast amount of Cockney admiration has been wasted on it. I found it undergoing repairs, which must greatly improve it; but, after all, it is a meagre thing, when one has seen the Gothic of the cathedrals, or of such a castle as Kenilworth. I did not see much of the interior, as visitors were necessarily excluded, in favour of the workmen; and so after visiting the conservatories, and various outlying dependencies of this great house, I left it, not greatly overwhelmed with what I had seen. I was better pleased with my return voyage, on the Dee, and with the river-view of Chester. CHAPTER XXIV. _A Trip into Wales._ From the walls of Chester, one has a very tempting prospect before him in the mountains of Wales. To Wales I now took my way, and first of all alighted at Holywell station, to visit the wondrous shrine and fountain of St. Winifred. A Welsh lady had advised me, by all means, to pay this homage to her native place, and had sportively prepared me to see something very strange, indeed, in the legendary well of its tutelar. The story which she told me was this, in short: that the well had sprung from the earth, in the olden time, just where the head of the Holy Winifred, fair and lovely as it was, touched the earth, when her barbarous lover, Caradoc, smote it off, to revenge his disappointed passion. Be this as it may, I found, in Holywell, a very remarkable pool and fountain, by which lay a great number of impotent folk, as formerly they did at Bethesda, in Jewry, waiting for the moving of the waters. But no—these waters always move. The fountain gushes up with violence, and runs with a full tide. Whether it cures or not, I cannot say. It is supposed to do so; and is used for healing purposes by hundreds. The crutches of many of those who have been healed, are reverently hung up over the well; and several inscriptions have been cut, deep in the stone walls and pillars of the Church which rises above it, expressive of gratitude for cure. Here James the Second came to worship, in his dotage, in 1686. The Irish Romanists, and modern converts, consider it a sort of duty to uphold the miraculous reputation of the well, and are very zealous in such tributes to the legend and the saint. One may certainly believe that it is a healing spring, without swallowing the whole story about St. Winifred; and for one, I am far from unwilling to see such springs resorted to, and used, in a religious spirit, as the gift of God. Nay, if we might but have the truth, and not a “superstitious vanity,” I should rejoice to see them connected with the