eways, and the rooms all open
into a wide passage that runs round three sides of the building, and is a
museum in itself. Old and new are just enough blended to produce comfort,
and the stately, old-English look of the drawing-room, with its dark
panelling and tapestry, is a reproach to the pink-and-white,
plaster-of-Paris style of too many remodelled houses. Outside there is a
garden distinguished by a heavy old wall overrun with creepers, dividing
two levels and making a striking object in the landscape; and beyond that,
where the country grows bleak and begins to remind one of moors, there are
the last survivors of a unique breed of wild cattle, which, like the
mastiffs at the house, bear the name of the place. The name of another
Cheshire house, formerly belonging to the Stanleys, and now to Mr.
Gladstone, is probably familiar to American readers--Hawarden Castle. The
present house must trust entirely to associations for its interest, having
been built in 1809, before much taste was applied to restore old places,
but the old castle in the park dates from the middle of the thirteenth
century. The park is not unlike that of Arundel, but the views from the
ruin are finer and more varied. The counties of Caernarvon, Denbigh, Flint,
Cheshire and Lancashire are spread out around it, and the ruin itself is
beautiful and extensive.

The road from Hawarden to Boughton is exceedingly grand: we come upon one
of the widest panoramas of the Dee and one of the most typical of English
country scenes. A vast sweep of country unsurpassed in richness spreads
along the river on the Cheshire side: sixty square miles of fields and
pastures are in sight, with elms, sycamores and formal rows of Lombardy
poplars. Wherever the trees cluster in a grove they usually mark the site
of a country-house or a cherished ruin, like this one of old Hawarden,
where one enormous oak tree sweeps its branches on the ground on every
side, and forms a canopy whence you can peer out, as through the delicate
tracery of a Gothic window, at the landscape beyond. The mouth of the Dee
is visible from this road, whence at low water it seems reduced to a huge
sandbank, through which the tired river trickles like a brook. The dun sky
and yellow sands and gray sea, with the island of Hilbree, a counterpart of
Lindisfarne both in its legend of a recluse and its continual alternation
twice a day between the state of an island and a peninsula, make a picture
pleasant to