imagination led him to picture such a place on the frontispiece of the _Legends_; but the stranger would seek for it in vain. Instead, he would find an ancient farmhouse, standing in a meadow skirting the road to Folkestone, a mile from the place where it branches from the Dover Road. An ancient farmhouse, its roof bent and bowed with age, and the greater part of it shrouded in ivy, from which Tudor chimneys peep picturesquely. In the meadow are traces of walls and an old well which before the greater part of Tappington Manor-house was destroyed stood in a quadrangle formed by the great range of buildings. Within the farmhouse there remains much that is quaint and interesting. The chief feature is a grand oak staircase of Elizabethan or Jacobean period, with the merchant's mark of that "Thomas Marsh of Marston," familiar to readers of that fine legend _The Leech of Folkestone_, carved on the newel. On the whitewashed walls, crossed here and there by beams of black oak, hang portraits of half-real, half-legendary Ingoldsbys, and on the staircase landing, outside the bedroom of the "bad Sir Giles," are still shown bloodstains, relics of an extraordinary fratricide that was committed here while the war between Charles and the Parliament was raging. [Sidenote: TAPPINGTON] It is quite remarkable that while Barham clothed Tappington with many a picturesque legend and detail of his own invention, he never alluded to the genuine tragedy. The secret staircase, the "bad Sir Giles," "Mrs. Botherby," and many another picturesque but fictitious character or incident are introduced, and perhaps the visitor may feel somewhat disappointed at not finding the turrets, the hall, or the moat described so fully in the _Legends_; but the story of the fratricide is genuine enough for the most sober and conscientious historian. It seems that when all England was divided between the partisans of Charles and his Parliament, Tappington Manor-house was inhabited by two brothers, descendants of the Thomas Marsh whose mark is on the staircase. They had taken different sides in the great struggle then going on, and had quarrelled so bitterly that they never spoke to one another, and actually lived in different parts of the house; only using this staircase between them as they retired along it at night to their several apartments. One night they met on top of the stairs. No one knew what passed between them, whether black looks or bitter words were used; but as the Cavalier passed, his Puritan brother drew a dagger and stabbed him in the back. He fell and died on the spot, and the blood-stains are there to this day. Opposite Tappington is the modernized Denton Court, with the old chapel of Denton standing in the Park. Of this you may read in the _Legends_, but those who seek the brass of the Lady Rohesia, with its inscription-- "Praie for ye sowle of ye Lady Royse And for alle Christen sowles!"