Round the mansion lie its old-fashioned walled gardens, and on the north the orchard with a picturesque group of three gnarled old Spanish chestnuts. Eastward the eye rests on Lincoln, with its houses climbing the steep, crowned by the triple towers of the Minster; and in the nearer foreground are the massive oak-woods of Doddington and Skellingthorpe, the immemorial breeding-place of herons. To the westward the hills of Nottinghamshire rise across the Trent, the hidden course of whose stream is marked only by the clumps of trees at Spalford Bank and Marnham Ferry. Amid such surroundings the great house has stood for full three hundred years, and has sheltered generation after generation of those whose portraits now adorn its walls. Here to all appearance it may stand for three hundred years to come, if only it escapes that doom of fire to which Seaton-Delaval itself and so many other ancient mansions have fallen a prey. LINCOLNSHIRE FAMILIES BY REV. CANON MADDISON, M.A., F.S.A. It is quite impossible within the limits of a short paper to give an exhaustive account of the Lincolnshire Families. They can be classified as—1st, Baronial; 2nd, Knightly; 3rd, Gentle. With the baronial, which includes such names as Darcy, Kyme, de Roos, Trehampton, &c., I do not concern myself. Their pedigrees are given, for the most part, in works of reference. Of the great baronial families I do not think a single one exists at the present day in the male line. The Neviles now seated in Lincolnshire belong to the Nottinghamshire branch of that great family. The Lincolnshire Neviles, which have been a puzzle to genealogists, have long since been extinct. Perhaps the Watertons may be taken as an almost solitary instance of the survival of a family which held a very high position in the county in the twelfth century. The great Lincolnshire estates, it is true, passed to the Welles family in the fifteenth century, but a junior branch continued at Walton in Yorkshire down to recent times. Walton has been sold, but the late Mr. Edmund Waterton became possessed of property in St. James Deeping, where the original manor of Waterton was, and was “of Waterton Deeping.” Still, although descended from this ancient race, his line, for many hundreds of years, was connected rather with Yorkshire than Lincolnshire. But the Langtons, of Langton by Spilsby, are an instance, quite unique in this county, of a family retaining possession of the manor and advowson of their estate from the thirteenth century. They seem to have held a higher position then than they did in later times. Strange to say, no Langton was Sheriff of the county till 1612. The Thorolds must be content to give up the legend of being descended from a Saxon sheriff. It is surely enough to be able to say they hold property which came to them from a Lincolnshire heiress in the fourteenth century, and led them to leave Yorkshire for Marston in Lincolnshire.