No brief description could do justice to the wonders of a house so rich in objects connected with our history. The whole is remarkable and strange: in no place have I felt so deeply the influence left by the famous dead. Weird legends are connected with certain rooms: if the history of Rufford were written in full it would be remarkable beyond imagination. One of the most fascinating places is the chapel, erected in the time of Charles the Second, and surely the most comfortable sanctuary in any nobleman's house. At the west end is a gallery, its walls lined with ancient embossed leather, its Prayer Books dating from the Restoration, its faded and antique chairs suggesting all manner of pleasant reveries during service. The state rooms are admirable in so far as restfulness and quiet beauty take the place of excessive pomp. Each piece of furniture is storied and of great value. Nothing startles the eye; the colouring is always subdued and pleasing; in short, Rufford combines in perfection the palace and the home. The outward appearance suggests harmony without extravagance. The pleasure grounds, although not on as large a scale as those of the other houses, are exceedingly beautiful--the Japanese Garden being a wonderful pleasaunce in miniature, with paved walks and toy lake and waterfall. Not far away the River Maun, with rich flowers and shrubs on its banks, glides calmly to a tranquil mere, where grey herons perch like birds of stone on the boughs of the island trees. In front of an older entrance to the house stretches a grass-grown avenue, by which is the "Wilderness" of Elizabethan days. There lie the remains of famous racehorses, reared on the estate. The park itself has not been submitted to the attentions of the landscape gardener: it is natural and unspoiled as in monkish times. Of the original Cistercian abbey, built in 1148 and peopled with monks brought from Rievaulx in Yorkshire, little remains save a groined and pillared chamber, supposed to have been the refectory, and used nowadays as a servants' hall. There is a singular hooded fireplace with a fine old dog-grate, and against the end wall stands a long oaken table--a relic of ancient feasting. Rufford Abbey owed its existence to the filial piety of a collateral descendant of William the Conqueror. The sixteenth-century translation of the Foundation reads thus:--