The southern portion of the building is of the most ancient date. Its walls are of great thickness. The Great House is full of traditions of past history, and its gloomy vaults and passages below ground must have witnessed many a tragic scene at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion. Here it was that Judge Jeffreys took up his quarters for a time when he came to stamp out the Rebellion and to wreak the vengeance of James II upon the unhappy followers of his rival. The owner of the house in those days was a man named Jones—the squire of Lyme—who aided and abetted Jeffreys in all his awful tyranny, spying upon the inhabitants and reporting every idle word that might serve to incriminate them. The memory of Jones is loathed to this day, and tradition declares the house to be haunted by his ghost. Happily the little girl, who came to live in this weird old mansion, knew nothing of its tragic history, and could laugh and play with childish mirth above its sombre vaults. In her _Recollections_, Mary Mitford speaks of the “large, lofty rooms of the building, of its noble oaken staircases, its marble hall, and its long galleries,” and mentions “the book room,” where her grandfather Dr. Russell’s fine library was arranged. “Behind the building,” she says, “which extended round a paved quadrangle, was the drawing-room, a splendid apartment looking upon a little lawn surrounded by choice evergreens,” beyond which lay the spacious gardens. The drawing-room still bears traces of its former dignity in its lofty ceiling and handsome dentil cornice, and also in its three tall recessed windows, whose side panels end in fine curled scrolls. [Illustration: THE GREAT HOUSE] “My own nurseries,” she says, “were spacious and airy, but the place which I most affected was a dark panelled chamber on the first floor, to which I descended through a private door by half a dozen stairs, so steep that, still a very small and puny child between eight and a half and nine and a half, and unable to run down them in the common way, I used to jump from one step to the other.” We have entered this small panelled room, which is lighted by a narrow leaded window, and as we looked upon the steps leading down from the upper room we fancied we saw the tiny figure jumping from step to step. “This chamber,” continues Miss Mitford, “was filled with such fossils as were then known ... some the cherished products of my own discoveries, and some broken for me by my father’s little hammer from portions of the rocks that lay beneath the cliffs, under which almost every day we used to wander hand-in-hand.”