ll, Yorkshire; Ford House, Devon; Cothele,
Cornwall; Hollingbourne Manor House, Kent (altered of late years);
Salisbury Court, near Shenley, Herts.

Of hiding-places and secret chambers in the ancient castles and
mansions upon the Continent we know but little.

Two are said to exist in an old house in the Hradschin in Prague--one
communicating from the foundation to the roof "by a windlass or
turnpike." A subterranean passage extends also from the house
beneath the street and the cathedral, and is said to have its
exit in the Hirch Graben, or vast natural moat which bounds the
chateau upon the north.

A lady of our acquaintance remembers her feeling of awe when,
as a school-girl, she was shown a hiding-place in an old mansion
near Baden-Baden--a huge piece of stone masonry swinging aside
upon a pivot and revealing a gloomy kind of dungeon behind.

The old French chateaux, according to Froisart, were rarely without
secret means of escape. King Louis XVI., famous for his mechanical
skill, manufactured a hiding-place in an inner corridor of his
private apartments at the Palace of Versailles. The wall where
it was situated was painted to imitate large stones, and the
grooves of the opening were cleverly concealed in the shaded
representations of the divisions. In this a vast collection of
State papers was preserved prior to the Revolution.[1]

[Footnote 1: Vide _The Memoirs of Madame Campan._]

Mr. Lang tells us, in his admirable work _Pickle the Spy_,
that Bonnie Prince Charlie, between the years 1749 and 1752,
spent much of his time in the convent of St. Joseph in the Rue
St. Dominique, in the Faubourg St. Germain, which under the late
Empire (1863) was the hotel of the Minister of War. Here he appears
to have been continually lurking behind the walls, and at night
by a secret staircase visiting his protectress Madame de Vasses.
Allusion is made in the same work to a secret cellar with a "dark
stair" leading to James III.'s furtive audience-chamber at his
residence in Rome.

So recently as the year 1832 a hiding-place in an old French
house was put to practical use by the Duchesse de Berry after
the failure of her enterprise to raise the populace in favour of
her son the Duc de Bordeaux. She had, however, to reveal herself
in preference to suffocation, a fire, either intentionally or
accidentally, having been ignited close to where she was hidden,
recalling the terrible experiences of Father Gerard at "Braddocks