The most important part of the garden lies to the west of the house, where there is a double garden of stiff pattern with high box borders and clipped evergreens. At a right angle to this, the spectator, standing at some distance westward, and looking back towards the east and straight with the space between the pair of gardens of angular design, sees a broad space flanked on either side by a row of handsome upright yews. The ground between is a flower garden of large diamond-shaped beds in two sizes, with cleverly-arranged green edgings. But now that the large Irish yews have grown to their early maturity, dominating the garden and insisting on their own strong parallel lines, it is open to question whether it would not have been better to have had a wide, clear middle space of green straight down the length, with the flowers in shapely, ordered masses to right and left. The close succession of large beds gives the impression of impediments to comfortable progress. It was wise to leave the Irish yews unclipped. Though the common English yew is the tree that is of all others the most docile to the discipline of training and shearing, the upright growing variety will have none of it. In some fine English gardens they are clipped, always with disastrous effect. They will only take one form: that of an ugly swollen bottle, or lamp-chimney with a straight top. Their own form is quite symmetrical enough for use in any large design. SPEKE HALL There are, alas! but few now remaining of the timber buildings of the sixteenth century that are either so important in size or so well-preserved as this beautiful old Lancashire house. They were built at a time when the country had settled down into a peaceable state; when houses need no longer be walled and loopholed against the probable raids of enemies; when their windows might be of ample size and might look abroad without fear. Many of them, however, were still moated, for a moat was of use not only for defence but as a convenient fish-pond, and as a bar to the depredations of wolves, foxes and rabbits. The advance of civilisation also brought with it a greater desire for home comforts, and the genius of the country, unspoilt, unfettered, undiluted by that mass of half-digested knowledge of many styles that has led astray so many of the builders of modern days, by a natural instinct cast these dwellings into forms that we now seek out and study in the effort to regain our lost innocence, and that in many cases we are glad to adopt anew as models of what is most desirable for comfort and for the happy enjoyment of our homes.