The new part, built by the first Sir Watkin, is of itself a good house, yet was only a portion of a more extensive design. It is finished in that substantial yet neat manner becoming the seat of an honest English country gentleman, adapted to the reception of his worthy neighbors, who may experience his hospitality without dread of spoiling his frippery ornaments, becoming only the assembly-rooms of a town-house or the villa of a great city." The present house is splendid and enormous, severer in style than Eaton, but as wilderness-like in its magnificence. The trees in the park, which is enclosed by an eight-mile wall, are very old and grand, especially the Ruabon avenue, a mile in length, leading from the gates of the old church, where are the family monuments. Wynnestay formerly belonged to the founder of Valle Crucis Abbey, Madoc ap Gryfydd Maeler, and came to the Wynns by the inter-marriage of one of the Gwedyr family of that name with the heiress of Eyton Evans. This creation of almost princely lines by the union of so much land and influence in one family is characteristic of the Middle Ages in English history, and has its faint shadow even in these days, when you invariably find in each family its self-installed herald, sometimes an old maid, often an old bachelor or widower, given to poring over pictures and pedigrees, and dreamily recounting to mischievously attentive cousins the glories of such an alliance, the importance of a fifty-sixth "quartering," or the story of such and such an old love-affair that spoilt (or otherwise) the negotiation for another thousand acres of land. The Welsh are even more given to family pride than the English, but everywhere you find the old sentiment lingering in some remote corner of the family, sometimes cropping out in a beautiful illuminated volume, for which the head of the family generally has to pay, or oftener making the life-study and delight of some innocent, kind-hearted old bookworm. Luckily, we are spared the heraldic lawsuits of old times, such as were sustained by the Grosvenors and the Scropes in the reign of Richard II. respecting the arms they each claimed to bear, and during which the names of two famous men, Chaucer and John of Gaunt, were affixed as witnesses to the manuscript account of it, still preserved in the library at Eaton Hall. Owen Glendower and Hotspur were also called as witnesses at various times on this 'three years' trial. [Illustration: ANCIENT HALF-TIMBERED HOUSES, FOREGATE STREET, CHESTER.]