I wonder if it takes kindly to its new home? Land, they say, sometimes resents change of owners, especially passing from a family who had held lordship of the soil for generations. When the old squire dies, the last of his line, the land grieves. It seems to know that it is going to be sold and broken up, and it loses heart. It goes rotten like apples. A patch goes wrong here and a patch goes wrong there, and the rottenness spreads and runs together. It takes the land long to get used to a new master. Has our old oak court cupboard sensitive feelings like the ancestral acres? Or is it silently and sullenly indifferent to all the changes of fortune that befall it? I have an oak armchair with a unique story to tell. The back of it is one large panel carved with heavy flora and foliated decoration; on the cross-rail below the panel is carved in bold raised letters: 16 ELLIN RYLAND 94 The two arms are bountifully carved, and the carving terminates in a large Tudor rose forming a knob at the end of each arm. The arm-tops, through constant use, are smooth and shine like unto burnished bronze. The supports and front legs are twisted in good Jacobean manner, and the broad stretcher is carved with two long feathery, flowing acanthus-leaves curling round gracefully at the tips as if under pressure of a strong breeze, and crouching within their embrace nestles a rose in ambush. The chair has been mothered with lifelong care, and the bloom and beauty of age sit upon it like a crown of glory. So Ellin Ryland has won for her name immortality among the roses. We often think of Ellin and question the chair about her, but information does not flow freely from that quarter. Did Ellin order the chair from the cabinet-maker herself? I think not; perhaps her lover gave it her on her birthday, or her husband on their wedding-day. No doubt the chair’s existence celebrates a red-letter day in the annals of the family. The name now is only a legend to us, but there it is, legible after the flight of two hundred and twenty years. The old chair is a better monument to Ellin Ryland’s memory than a stone slab in a damp churchyard, with her name graven on it in crumbling letters. I dare say Ellin had a thin slice of vanity in her nature; we all have, and would like our names printed somewhere imperishably. During two hundred and twenty years the moss and lichen, the sun and the frost, conspire together to obliterate any lettering in churchyard stones, but the writing in tablet-oak on the armchair is as brave as ever. The name is only a legend, but it keeps her memory green.