t no time high, sank to zero, and she soon passed peacefully
away. She left a will in which her personal property (about 40,000
pounds a year) was bequeathed to Gwyneth, "as my beloved son, Percy, has
enough for his needs," the revenues of the dukedom of Stalybridge being
about 300,000 pounds per annum before the agricultural depression. She
might well have thought I needed no more. Of course I put in no claim
for these estates, messuages, farms, mines, and so forth, nor for my
hereditary ducal pension of 15,000 pounds. But Gwyneth and I are not
uncomfortably provided for, and I no longer contribute paragraphs of
gossip to the Pimlico Postboy, nor yet do I vaticinate in the columns of
the Tipster. Perhaps I ought to have fled from the Towers the morning
after my arrival. And I declare that I would have fled but for Gwyneth
and "Love, that is a great Master."

THE HOUSE OF STRANGE STORIES.

The House of Strange Stories, as I prefer to call it (though it is not
known by that name in the county), seems the very place for a ghost. Yet,
though so many peoples have dwelt upon its site and in its chambers,
though the ancient Elizabethan oak, and all the queer tables and chairs
that a dozen generations have bequeathed, might well be tenanted by
ancestral spirits, and disturbed by rappings, it is a curious fact that
there is _not_ a ghost in the House of Strange Stories. On my earliest
visit to this mansion, I was disturbed, I own, by a not unpleasing
expectancy. There _must_, one argued, be a shadowy lady in green in the
bedroom, or, just as one was falling asleep, the spectre of a Jesuit
would creep out of the priest's hole, where he was starved to death in
the "spacious times of great Elizabeth," and would search for a morsel of
bread. The priest was usually starved out, sentinels being placed in all
the rooms and passages, till at last hunger and want of air would drive
the wretched man to give himself up, for the sake of change of
wretchedness. Then perhaps he was hanged, or he "died in our hands," as
one of Elizabeth's officers euphemistically put it, when the Jesuit was
tortured to death in the Tower. No "House of Seven Gables" across the
Atlantic can have quite such memories as these, yet, oddly enough, I do
not know of more than one ghost of a Jesuit in all England. _He_
appeared to a learned doctor in a library, and the learned doctor
described the phantom, not long ago, in the Athenaeum.

"Does