Broughton Hall, a fine old Jacobean mansion, stands to the east of Blore. It is a gloomy house, and has some ghostly traditions. We are reminded of the rather startling fact that upon developing a negative of the fine oak staircase there, the transparent figure of an old woman in a mob-cap stood in the foreground! Here was proof positive for the Psychological Society. But, alas! careful investigation upset the mystery. The shadowy outline proved to be painfully like the ancient housekeeper. The subject had required a long exposure, and the lady must have wished to be immortalised, for she certainly must have stood in front of the lens for at least a minute or so. It is strange this desire to be pictured. Any amateur photographer must have experienced the difficulties to be encountered in a village street. The hours of twelve and four are fatal. School children in thousands will crop up to fill up the foreground. In such a predicament a friend of ours was inspired with an ingenious remedy. Having covered his head with the black cloth, he was horrified to see a myriad of faces instead of the subject he wished to take. However, he got his focus adjusted somehow, and having placed his dark slide in position ready for exposure, he placed the cloth over the lens-end of the camera as if focussing in the opposite direction. Immediately there was a stampede for the other side, with considerable struggling as to who should be foremost. The cherished little bit of village architecture was now free, the cloth whipped away, and the exposure given. "Are we all taken in, mister?" asked one of the boys a little suspiciously. "Yes, my lads," was the response given, "you've all been taken in." And so they had, but went home rejoicing. Beside the staircase, there is little of interest inside Broughton. There was a hiding-place once in one of the rooms which was screened by an old oil painting, but it is now merged into tradition. The road from Newport passes through wild and romantic scenery. At Croxton, farther to the east, there is, or was, a Maypole, one of those old-world villages where ancient customs die hard. Swinnerton Hall, a fine Queen Anne house to the north-east, and nearer to Stone, is the seat of the ancient family of Fitzherbert, the beautiful widow of one of whose members was in 1785 married to the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV. The palatial Hall of Trentham, farther to the north, is rather beyond our province, being in the main modern. One grieves that the fine old house represented in Dr. Plot's quaint history of the county has passed away; one grieves, indeed, that so many of these fine Staffordshire houses are no more. The irreparable loss of Ingestre Hall, Wrothesley Hall, Enville Hall, and of Severn End in the adjoining county, makes one shudder at the dangers of fire in these ancestral mansions. Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire was only quite recently saved from a like fate by Lord Craven's activity and presence of mind.