Then it was that Humphrey Chetham, Manchester’s most famous benefactor, already planning the establishment of a free school, saw the College buildings, standing empty and forlorn, ready to his hand. He died in 1653, and so did not live to see the beginning of his school; but by his will of 1650 had appointed trustees for the purchase of the College, and at last, in 1658, his school of “Chetham’s Hospital” was opened. He directed that, “Ye boys shall be taught ye reading, ye writing, ye summes, and all kinds of ye ingenuitie,” and his will continues to be observed on the same spot, and in the identical buildings, to this day; the Chetham scholars even wearing the self-same picturesque but neat costume they wore when the institution was founded: dark-blue cloth jacket and knee-breeches, with silver buttons, and a queer little muffin-shaped cap. [Sidenote: _CHETHAM’S SCHOOL_] [Illustration: THE HALL, CHETHAM’S SCHOOL.] The Hospital and Library buildings suffer shockingly as to their exterior by the sooty atmosphere, but the various interiors are wonderfully interesting, intrinsically, and additionally from their situation amid such circumstances as those of a gigantic commercial city wherein cloistered buildings, reasonably to be expected at Oxford or Cambridge, are not looked for. The group of buildings has survived three uses: as manor-house of the baronial period; as the home of a religious fraternity; and for two hundred and fifty years as a school. The old hospitium, or guest-house, is the boys’ dormitory, where a hundred neat little cots are to be seen in long perspectives: the ancient kitchen that furnished curious, and often nasty, dinners to the ancient lords of the place and supplied the priests of the College with their not too cloistral meals—save for very shame their abstinent Friday fare of fish—is still in use, and sends forth the most appetising scents about midday; and the refectory is now partly the Governor’s quarters; while the Baronial Hall, where De la Warres held their very considerable state, is now the dining-hall. It is a noble apartment, this ancient hall, with its walls of thick masonry, its Gothic windows, and timbered roof. A bust of Chetham is placed on the wall over what was once a fireplace replacing the more ancient central hearth or brazier in the middle of the Hall. Electric lighting replaces older methods of illumination, and everywhere reveals with fine effect ancient panelling, painted devices and pictures. Over the cloister walks, in what was in the period of the collegiate establishment the priests’ dormitory, Chetham’s Library is housed in ancient presses greatly resembling those in the Bodleian at Oxford and the University Library at Cambridge. What was once the Warden’s room of the priestly establishment is now the Reading Room. To read scholarly books, to engage in the pursuit of curious knowledge in the Reading Room of Chetham’s Library is surely a wonderful privilege, for in this