I went downstairs about 12 and found the ladies in the drawing-room all complaining of the cold. Lady Derby took me over the house--it has not the beautiful proportions of Hatfield--is long, low, and rambling, but most comfortable. The library is a fine room with deep window recesses, and most comfortable with a bright fire burning. The librarian was there and showed us some of his treasures, among them an old copy of the "Roman de la Rose," and various old manuscripts. We went on to the dining-room, and Lady Derby explained the family portraits to me. The long, unbroken line of Earls of Derby is most interesting, and the change in the portraits for the two or three generations where the French blood shows itself, most curious. The wife of the Earl of Derby who died on the scaffold, giving his life for his King, was the famous Charlotte de la Tremouille, who defended her castle--Lathom House--so gallantly against Fairfax and his Roundheads. Do you remember one of our school-room books in America, "Heroines of History," where there was a description of the siege of Lathom House, and a picture of the Countess of Derby standing on the ramparts in a riding habit and hat and feathers and apparently loading a cannon herself and showing a gunner how to point it? The portraits are most interesting; first the regular Saxon type, then the French streak, pale oval faces, and dark eyes and hair (not unlike the Stuarts, who have always a foreign look); then the true British, more and more accentuated down to the present Earl. They have also in one of the halls the block on which the Lord Derby knelt who was beheaded in 1631. The sportsmen arrived about tea-time, apparently neither cold nor tired, and having had a fine shoot. New Year's Day, 1886.