But to reach the church and village one must pass Wilby Old Hall, a romantic building of red brick, with corbie-stepped gables, that peer darkly across the meadows. One cannot resist a closer glance, and the old place well repays that attention. It is now, and long has been, a farmhouse, but was built as a mansion somewhere about the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was when Elizabeth reigned, or in the first years of James I., that the hall first rose within the girdle of its moat: that moat only in part now remaining, but still plentifully stocked with fish. A family of Lovells probably built it; but the place soon passed from them into the hands of the Wiltons, of whom Robert Wilton, a Royalist colonel, had it at the time of the Civil War. Scratched with a diamond on a pane of one of the old casement windows of an upstairs bedroom is the name “Elizabeth,” with the date 1649. The surname is included, but is illegible. Perhaps it was this Elizabeth who inscribed the Latin lines on another window—lines that seemed to hint at some heavy sorrow. “Alas!” they said, when translated, “Alas! how can I tune my lute to a broken heart!” We may seek in vain for the personal sorrow that prompted this record; or was it the outpouring of a loyal soul? for the year 1649, when the unknown Elizabeth inscribed her name on the other casement, was the date of the execution of Charles I. [Illustration: WILBY OLD HALL.] Those lines, we say, _seemed_ to hint, and they are thus spoken of because quite recently, when the house was the scene of a sale at auction and pervaded by strangers, some unknown person prized the inscribed pane out of its leaden setting and made off with it. Invoking a murrain on all such, we come into the ancient market-town of Attleborough. XLI