In Seacome's 'History of the House of Stanley' there is an account, derived from another branch of the family, which coincides with the second-mentioned, with the important addition that the adopted child was discarded before the death of Sir Thomas Latham. It is further said, that on the adoption Sir Thomas had assumed for his crest "an Eagle upon wing, turning her head back and looking in a sprightly manner as for something she had lost," and that on the disowning, the Stanleys (one of whom had married the legal heiress to the estate) "either to distinguish or aggrandize themselves, or in contempt and derision, took upon them the Eagle and Child," thus manifesting the variation and the reason of it. It is scarcely necessary to state, that the Sir Oskell of the legend has no existence in the veritable records of history; and Mr. Ormerod, the learned historian of Cheshire, who is connected by marriage with the family of Latham, thinks the whole story may be "more safely referred to ancestral Northmen, with its scene in the pine-forests of Scandinavia."[229] The subjoined engraving relates to this legend. It is copied from a cast[230] taken from an oak carving attached to the stall of James Stanley, bishop of Ely, in the collegiate church (now cathedral) of Manchester, of which he was warden. The figures below the trees are a REBUS[231] of masons or stone-cutters, termed, in mediæval Latin, _Lathomi_; and the castellated gateway they are approaching is that of Latham Hall, the scene of the tradition. [Illustration] Trevelyan of Somersetshire, Bart. 'Gules, a horse argent armed or, issuant from the sea in base, party per fesse wavy, azure and of the second.' This family primarily bore a very different coat: their present armorials were assumed "on occasion of one of their ancestors swimming on horseback from the rocks called Seven Stones to the Land's End in Cornwall, at the time of an inundation, which is said to have overwhelmed a large tract of land, and severed thereby those rocks from the continent of Cornwall."[232] This story may appear rather improbable, but it should be remembered that some similar disruptions of land from the coast, such as the Goodwin Sands, Selsey Rocks, &c. are authentic matters of history. Whether the most powerful of the equine race, which are, even under far more favourable circumstances, "vain things for safety," would be able to outbrave the violence of the sea necessary to produce such a phenomenon, I leave to better horsemen than myself to decide.