For the remains of Hawstead Place, once visited in State by Queen Elizabeth, who dropped her fan in the moat to test the gallantry of her host, we searched in vain. A very old woman in mob-cap in pointing out the farm so named observed, "T'were nowt of much account nowadays, tho' wonderful things went on there years gone by." This was somewhat vague. We went up to the house and asked if an old gateway of which we had heard still existed. The servant girl looked aghast. Had we asked the road to Birmingham she could scarcely have been more dumbfounded. "No, there was no old gateway there," she said. We asked another villager, but he shook his head. "There was a lady in the church who died from a box on the ear!" This was scarcely to the point, and since we have discovered that the ancient Jacobean gateway is at Hawstead Place after all, we cannot place the Suffolk rustic intelligence above the average. It is in the kitchen garden, and in the alcoves of the pillars are moulded bricks with initials and hearts commemorating the union of Sir Thomas Cullum with the daughter of Sir Henry North. The moat is still to be seen, but the bridge spanning it has given way. The principal ruins of the old mansion were removed about a century ago. Gedding Hall, midway between Bury and Needham Market, is moated and picturesque, and before it was restored must have been a perfect picture, for as it is now it just misses being what it might have been under very careful treatment. A glaring red-brick tower has been added, which looks painfully new and out of keeping; and beneath two quaint old gables, a front door has been placed which would look very well in Fitz-John's Avenue or Bedford Park, but certainly not here. When old houses are nowadays so carefully restored so that occasionally it is really difficult to see where the old work ends and the new begins, one regrets that the care that is being bestowed upon West Stow could not have been lavished here. We come across another instance of bad restoration at Bildeston. There is a good old timber house at the top of the village street which, carefully treated, would have been a delight to the eye; but the carved oak corner-post has been enveloped in hideous yellow brickwork in such a fashion that one would rather have wished the place had been pulled down. But at the farther end of the village there is another old timber house, Newbury Farm, with carved beams and very lofty porch, which affords a fine specimen of village architecture of the fifteenth century. Within, there is a fine black oak ceiling of massive moulded beams, a good example of the lavish way in which oak was used in these old buildings.