races which change
nothing of the past.

Lady Lesbia's bedroom was the State chamber, which had been occupied by
kings and queens in days of yore. That grandiose four-poster, with the
carved ebony columns, cut velvet curtains, and plumes of ostrich
feathers, had been built for Elizabeth, when she deigned to include Rood
Hall in one of her royal progresses. Charles the First had rested his
weary head upon those very pillows, before he went on to the Inn at
Uxbridge, where he was to be lodged less luxuriously. James the Second
had stayed there when Duke of York, with Mistress Anne Hyde, before he
acknowledged his marriage to the multitude; and Anne's daughter had
occupied the same room as Queen of England forty years later; and now
the Royal Chamber, with adjacent dressing-room, and oratory, and
spacious boudoir all in the same suite, was reserved for Lady Lesbia
Haselden.

'I'm afraid you are spoiling me,' she told Mr. Smithson, when he asked
if she approved of the rooms that had been allotted to her. 'I feel
quite ashamed of myself among the ghosts of dead and gone queens.'

'Why so? Surely the Royalty of beauty has as divine a right as that of
an anointed sovereign.'

'I hope the Royal personages don't walk,' exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, in
her girlish tone; 'this is just the house in which one would expect
ghosts.'

Whereupon Mrs. Mostyn hastened to enlighten the company upon the real
causes of ghost-seeing, which she had lately studied in Carpenter's
'Mental Physiology,' and favoured them with a diluted version of the
views of that authority.

This was at afternoon tea in the library, where the brass-wired
bookcases, filled with mighty folios and handsome octavos in old
bindings, looked as if they had not been opened for a century. The
literature of past ages furnished the room, and made a delightful
background. The literature of the present lay about on the tables, and
testified that the highest intellectual flight of the inhabitants of
Rood Hall was a dip into the _Contemporary_ or the _Nineteenth Century_,
or the perusal of the last new scandal in the shape of Reminiscences or
Autobiography. One large round table was consecrated to Mudie, another
to Rolandi. On the one side you had Mrs. Oliphant, on the other Zola,
exemplifying the genius of the two nations.

After tea Mr. Smithson's visitors, most of whom had arrived in Sir
George's drag, explored the grounds. These were lovely beyond expression
in the low