The occasion was, I venture to think, really interesting, even pathetic, and for that reason, as well as because it gave me an opportunity of seeing more than the traveller can see in the ordinary way, the experience gained in a day shall be narrated. After all, to arouse healthy interest should be the first aim of every sensible writer, since only thus can he hope to secure attention, and people are, or may be, quite as interesting as places. It may be remembered generally, it is certainly not likely to be forgotten at Ingatestone for many a long year, that a day or two after the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 1897 a veritable tornado swept across Essex, working havoc to which this happy country is usually a complete stranger. In my capacity of correspondent to a great newspaper I was sent to describe the path of the storm, in the centre of which Ingatestone lay, with such fidelity as I might be able to compass. Sheer good fortune caused me to travel in the same carriage with Lord Petre on the Great Eastern Railway, and the kindly nature of this landowner, who was himself travelling to Ingatestone, with the object of surveying the details of a disaster affecting him personally in a serious manner, enabled me to see Ingatestone and its surroundings in a very intimate way without any preliminary trouble. First we went to the agent's house. It was a dream of ancient architecture and of splendid trees. One could almost have guessed from the high walls, the fish-ponds, and a cool green walk shaded by dense green trees, limes unless memory plays a trick, that this had been once the home of an ecclesiastical community. To learn that the walk under the close limes, if limes they indeed were, was known as the Nun's Walk, was no surprise. The sequestered character of the whole quite prepared the mind for the intelligence that Ingatestone Hall occupied the site of a subsidiary establishment attached to the greater nunnery of Barking, and it was clear that much of its original environment remained. This manor, with many others, was acquired at the Dissolution by Sir William Petre, the father of the first Lord Petre, and the old grange of the nuns, with very slight changes to all appearance, remained the seat of the great Roman Catholic family until they migrated to Thorndon Hall, near Brentwood, which, apart from its view and its contents, does not sound nearly so attractive as Ingatestone. "Murray," by the way, has a passage in this connection which, by dint of its tone, raises more than a suspicion of the Roman hand of the late Mr. Augustus Hare. In reference to the church we read: "Between the chancel and the south chapel is the monument of the well-known Sir William Petre (the father of the first Lord Petre) who, 'made of the willow and not of the oak,' managed to accommodate his loyalty and his religion to the various changes under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth." This, it is suggested, was a needlessly spiteful reference