It shows what taste can do. Its front is black and white, the timber showing outside, as in many of the southern Cheshire and Shropshire houses, and its low, broad-capped tower, its dozen or so of gables, its stacks of twisted and carved chimneys, give it a very English and home look. How much of the old original farmhouse remains one can hardly tell. Mr. Cotton, brother of Lord Combermere, the Peninsular hero, bought the estate when the place was in a half-ruined condition, but saw that the house had great capabilities. I have known such a restoration, on a smaller scale, to be as successful, when the large kitchen was turned into a drawing-room, ingeniously pieced on to a new and large alcove opening by a glass door on to the flower-garden, and communicating by a tower staircase with the chapel beside it and the "boudoir" up stairs; which room had a mullioned oriel window over the glass door. A library, study and second drawing-room were made out of the existing rooms down stairs, while the oldest part of the house, an ivied square tower with an orthodox ghost-story, was turned into schoolroom and nursery; and on a lower level (a feature which made the hall quite different from any I ever saw in a large or a small house) were built out a covered stone porch, a dining-room with mullioned bay-window and a stone mantelpiece receding to the ceiling, and guarded by two carved lions bearing shields, and a line of servants' offices enclosing a courtyard and a spring of famous water. [Illustration: BRIDGE STREET ROW, CHESTER.] Eaton Hall, the coldly magnificent pile of which we spoke before, has its rival in Wynnestay, the house of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, the largest landowner in Wales. No doubt the old house, burnt down in 1858, was less grand, but the loss of its collections of heirlooms, all things of historical and national interest to a Welshman, was a worse one than that of the building itself. Pennant, in his _Tour in Wales_ nearly a century ago, describes it with the same comments on domestic arrangements as many of our architects now start on as guiding principles: "The most ancient part is a gateway of wood and plaister, dated 1616. On a tower within the court is this excellent distich, allusive to the name of the house, Wynne stay, or 'Rest satisfied with the good things Providence has so liberally showered on you:' Cui domus est victusque decens, cui patria dulcis, Sunt satis hæc vitæ, cætera cura labor.