journeyed towards Chester, on a visit, it may be, to his virgin niece, the holy St. Werburgh, then Abbess of Chester. While there, we are told that, being admonished by God in a vision “to build a Church on the spot where he should find a white hind,” the king and his nobles engaged in the chace, and straightway coming upon a white hind at this very place, the royal hunter, in 689, founded and erected the Saxon CHURCH OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST. A more beautiful site for the erection of such a Church could scarcely have been chosen. Seated on an eminence overlooking the river Dee,—the rock it rests on washed by a stream of far nobler proportions than the river of _our_ day,—its banks studded with primæval woods, above which, and far beyond, the peaks of the Cambrian hills just showed their giant heads,—the yet nearer mountain ranges of Beeston and Peckforton,—the city itself, engirdled by the Walls of their Roman predecessors,—such was the prospect that gladdened the eyes of the good King Ethelred and the chaste Werburga, as they watched the progress of their newly-founded Church. What were the actual dimensions of the Saxon ST. JOHN’S is now, and must ever remain a mystery;—whether any and what portion of the present edifice may be properly referred back to that remote age is, in like manner, doubtful. There are, however, many who believe, like ourselves, that much of the older work, here and there perceptible, belongs to a period anterior to the Norman conquest. The brothers Lysons, (no mean authority, you’ll say) pronounce much of the nave and east end of the church to be late Saxon work—portions, no doubt, of the structure re-edified by Leofric, Earl of Mercia, in 1057. Originally the steeple was in the centre of the Church, at the point where the transept intersects the nave; but in or about 1468, it suddenly gave way, and destroyed in its fall great part of the choir and east end of the Church. This tower was soon after rebuilt, and another erected at the west end of the nave:—the former again fell in 1572, and this time the parishioners declined to restore it. The west steeple shared a similar fate in 1574, destroying the whole of that extremity of the fabric. Look up, from our present position at the Gateway of the Churchyard, and the effects of this mishap will be at once apparent,—the steeple, one hundred and fifty feet high, stands isolated from the main body of the Church, that portion broken in by the fall having since been suffered to remain so by the authorities of the parish. If we pass round to the west side of the tower, we shall see midway a canopied niche, in which stands the statue of the abbot king Ethelred, caressing at his side the “white hind” of his vision. This statue originally decorated the centre tower; but being found _miraculously unhurt_ amongst the heap of rubbish created by that structure in its fall, was removed by the parishioners to its present lofty and dignified position.