monks from the abbey at the end of the pike. The families of Wellfield and Burnshire presently were united by the marriage of the sole heiress of the Burnshires with the sole heir of the Wellfields, and it was at this juncture that another great property called Brentwood, some three miles away, lapsed, through lack of direct heirs male, from the Burnshire family to a collateral branch of the same, named Waddington, which Waddingtons continued to be devout Roman Catholics, while the Wellfields turned heretics, to the great distress of the reverend fathers, the Jesuits, who about this period in the family history were beginning to make a great noise in the world, and to exert their power and make it felt. Wellfield Abbey, then, got into heretic hands, and the heretics continued to be men of mark; while the pious and devout Waddingtons had the ill luck (or the ill grace) to die out, and their representatives, in the year of grace 1794, let their ancient abode on the hill-side at a nominal rent to those Jesuit fathers who were driven from their French college at L—— by the Revolution. They were thrifty, these Jesuit fathers, and eventually bought the whole estate, and their representatives possess it to this day, and have made of it the first Roman Catholic seminary in the north at any rate, if not in the whole of England. Indeed, that corner of this favoured land is a Catholic stronghold. Meanwhile, the heretic Wellfields of Wellfield continued to flourish, seemingly, like a green bay-tree; though, taking the royalist side in the Stuart troubles, they are said to have suffered heavy losses therefrom. The most perfect _entente cordiale_ always existed between them and the neighbouring Catholic gentry, and the reverend fathers at Brentwood; and they were always classed amongst the first families of the neighbourhood when they were at home. Of late years they had lived much abroad. At the time now referred to, 18—, there were only two representatives of the line: John Felix Wellfield, and a son; the said John Felix had been an only child, as had his father before him, and his own wife was recently dead.