ad
the drawing-room and the dining-room respectively, both exceedingly grand
rooms, ingenious in design and shape, each with two oriel windows and
lighted by three others and a large bay window: this suite completes the
east side. The south is occupied by the end of the drawing-room and a vast
library--all _en suite_. The library is lighted by four bay windows, three
flat ones and a fine alcove, and the rest of the main building to the west
is made up of billiard- and smoking-rooms, waiting-hall, groom-of-chambers'
sitting- and bed-rooms, and a carpet-room, besides the necessary
staircases. This completes the main building, and a corridor leads to the
kitchen and cook's offices: this corridor, which passes over the upper
part of the kitchen, branches off into two parts--one leading to an
excellently-planned mansion for the family and the private secretary, and
another leading to the stables, which are arranged with great skill. The
pony stable, the carriage-horse stable, the riding horses, occupy different
sides, and through these are arranged, just in the right places, the rooms
for livery and saddle grooms and coachmen. The laundry, wash-house,
gun-room and game-larder occupy another building, which, however, is easily
approached, and the whole building, though it extends seven hundred feet in
length, is a perfect model of compactness. Great facilities are given to
any one who desires to see it." The mention of a "mansion for the family"
shows how the associations of a home are lost in this wilderness of
magnificence: indeed, I remember a remark of a person whose husband had
three or four country-houses in England and Scotland and a house in London,
that "she never felt at home anywhere."

[Illustration: CHESTER CATHEDRAL AND CITY WALL.]

The farms in this neighborhood are mostly small, the average being seventy
acres, and some are still smaller, though when one gets down to ten, one is
tempted to call them gardens. Grazing and dairy-work are the chief
industries. Farther inland, beyond the manufacturing town of Stockport, is
a house of the Leghs, an immense building, more imposing than lovely in its
exterior, but one of the most individual and pleasant houses in its
interior as well as in its human associations. It has been altered at
various times, and bears traces, like a corrected map, of each new phase of
architecture for several hundred years. The four sides form a huge
quadrangle, entered by foreign-looking gat