he rooms must be enlarged, by pulling out some boards you may discover
some vaults. Also, if it appear that there be some corners to the
chimneys, and the same boarded, if the boards be taken away there will
appear some secret place. If the walls seem to be thick and covered
with wainscot, being tried with a gimlet, if it strike not the wall but
go through, some suspicion is to be had thereof. If there be any
double loft, some two or three feet, one above another, in such places
any person may be harboured privately. Also, if there be a loft towards
the roof of the house, in which there appears no entrance out of any
other place or lodging, it must of necessity be opened and looked into,
for these be ordinary places of hovering (hiding)."

The house was searched from garret to cellar without any discovery
being made, and Mrs. Abingdon, feigning to be angry with the
searchers, shut herself up in her bedroom day and night, eating and
drinking there, by which means through the secret tube she fed Father
Garnet and another Jesuit father. But after a protracted search of ten
days, these two men surrendered themselves, pressed, it is said, "for
the need of air rather than food, for marmalade and other sweetmeats
were found in their den, and they had warm and nutritive drinks passed
to them by the reed through the chimney," as already described. This
historic mansion, it may be added, on account of its elevated
position, was capitally adapted as a place of concealment, for "it
afforded the means of keeping a watchful look-out for the approach of
the emissaries of the law, or of persons by whom it might have been
dangerous for any skulking priest to be seen, supposing his reverence
to have gone forth for an hour to take the air."

Another important instance of a strange room is that existing at
Ingatestone Hall, in Essex, which was, in years gone by, a summer
residence belonging to the Abbey of Barking. It came with the estate
into possession of the family of Petre in the reign of Henry VIII.,
and continued to be occupied as their family seat until the latter
half of the last century. In the south-east corner of a small room
attached to what was probably the host's bedroom, there was discovered
some years ago a mysterious hiding place--fourteen feet long, two feet
broad, and ten feet high. On some floor-boards being removed, a hole
or trap door--about two feet square--was found, with a twelve-foot
ladder, to descend into the r