The great dining-hall had remained almost unchanged since the days of the first Charles. Its vast chimney-piece, which rose nearly to the ceiling, was covered with marvellous scrolls and legends, and innumerable wild cats' heads among them, over all being the arms of Trevelyan of Lamorna; _gules_, a demi-horse _argent_ issuing from the sea, adapted from the circumstance of one of the family swimming on horseback from the Seven Stones to the Land's End, when they were suddenly separated from the continent by a terrible inundation of the ocean, and as this dangerous reef is no less than nine miles from Scilly, where a light-ship points it out to the mariner, the feat was well worthy of being recorded, at least in heraldry. The furniture here was quaint and old, massive and richly carved, and though the vast stone-flagged chamber, where many a Cornish cavalier has whilom drunk "confusion to Cromwell and the Rump," and where still stands the great dining table with its daïs, where of old "the carles of low degree" had sat below the salt, is sombre and gloomy, somewhat of lightness is imparted by the splendid modern conservatory that opens off it, with marble floor and shelves of iron fret-work laden with rare and exotic plants. It boasts of a chamber known as "the Queen's," wherein Henrietta Maria had slept one night before she fled to France, and since then no one has ever occupied the ancient bed that, like a huge catafalque, stands upon three steps in the centre of the wainscoted room which like several others in Rhoscadzhel, has hangings of faded green tapestry, that are lifted to give entrance; and where the hearths, intended for wood alone, have grotesque andirons in the form of the inevitable koithgath on its hind legs. And on the walls of these old chambers hung many a trophy of the past, and many a weapon of the present day, from the great two-handed sword wielded by Henry Lord Lamorna at the Battle of Pinkey down to the yeomanry sabre worn by the present peer at the coronation of George IV., a peer of whose effeminacy the said Lord Henry would have been sorely ashamed.