Not far from this fishing house stood Beresford Hall, the ancestral home of Charles Cotton. It was pulled down some years ago, when it was condemned as being structurally unsafe. But the owner (the late Mr. Beresford Hope) had all the stones carefully numbered and marked with a view to their re-erection somewhat after the old style. They now lie in an adjacent meadow. Beresford Hall in Charles Cotton's days was a noble building. It stood in plantations among the rocks with woodland vistas opening out to the windings of the water. The hall was wainscoted in oak. It was rich in old carved furniture, ebony coffers, and trophies of the chase. The most prized possession, surrounded with arms and armour, hunting horns and falcons' hoods and bells, antlers and fowling-pieces, was the fishing rod presented to Charles Cotton by old Izaak, whose bed-chamber, "with sheets laid up in lavender," was one of the choicest apartments of the house. There were figured patterns over the chimney-piece, and angels' heads stamped in relief on the ceiling. On the rocks above the site of the hall are to be seen vestiges of the Prospect Tower, the basement of which was Cotton's study, and the summit a beacon where flambeaux were lit by his wife to guide her husband home in the darkness, even as Hero's watch-fires brought her beloved Leander to her bosom. Cotton himself called this observatory "Hero's Tower," and in a poetic epistle, describing his journey from London to Basford Hall, he thus alludes to the building:-- "Tuesday at noon at Lichfield town we baited, But there some friends, who long that hour had waited, So long detain'd me, that my charioteer Could drive that night but to Uttoxeter. And there, the Wednesday being market-day, I was constrain'd with some kind lads to stay, Tippling till afternoon, which made it night, When from my Hero's Tower I saw the light Of her flambeaux, and fancied, as we drave, Each rising hillock was a swelling wave, And that I swimming was, in Neptune's spight, To my long long'd for harbour of delight." Dissipated Charles! devoted wife! [Illustration: THE BANKS OF THE DOVE.]