To view Knole intimately is not given to the many. What are seventeen rooms out of three hundred and sixty-five, even though they be rooms of State! In fact it is rather in the more ordinary rooms, if any of those at Knole can so be styled, that you read its everyday story of old. After all, the Lords of Knole were not always entertaining kings and great nobles. Sometimes they had a “day off,” no less than the British workman of this era of ours, and then they were a thought more easy and less splendid, and occupied the second-best rooms, just as the ordinary Briton of to-day does, when he is not wanting to “show off.” I am afraid we all want to impress the visitor with a magnificence that is not kept up when he is gone. The lower-class parlour, the drawing-room of the upper strata, are the superstitions not only of to-day, or of one or two classes. They probably go back to the beginning of things, when even Prehistoric Man had his ordinary cave to live in and his extraordinary, in which his wife “received.” [Illustration: THE SOUTH FRONT, KNOLE. _Photo by C. Essenhigh Corke & Co._] There are thus whole suites of ancient rooms at Knole, now silent and deserted; and overhead, above the long galleries of stately magnificence, are interminable attics, called “wardrobes,” not because of being storerooms of clothes, old or new; but presumably the playrooms of the boys and lads of good family who, after the old English custom, were sent to Knole under wardship of the noble owners, to learn the usages of good society and the duties of chivalrous knights. In short, Knole, and every other castle or stately mansion, was, as it were, a training-college, a seminary of deportment and knightly devoirs; and in them one learned that good form whose inculcation is supposed to be the only value of Oxford and Cambridge at this day. [Illustration: THE “DUMB BELL.”] An odd surviving relic of Knole as a College of Good Manners is the curious contrivance known as the “Dumb Bell,” in that one of these wardrobes styled the “Dumb Bell Gallery.” It very closely resembles the windlass seen over old country wells, with a roller on which is wound a rope that descends through a hole cut in the floor, into the billiard-room. The arms projecting from the roller are iron, tipped with lead. This machine, which appears to date back to about the beginning of the seventeenth century, is thought to have been in the nature of a “home exerciser,” and to have been suggested by the bell-ropes and the exercise of bell-ringing in church towers. Here, however, the athlete could bring up his muscles without being a nuisance to every one within earshot. From this originated the name of those very different objects, used however for the same purpose of exercising—the modern “dumb-bells.” XXI