nders them worthy of this venerable
mansion, for the very rats of this ancient seat are gray. Since these
have not quitted it, we hope at least this house may stand during the
small remainder of days these poor animals have to live, who are now
too infirm to remove to another: they have still a small subsistence
left them in the few remaining books of the library.

I had never seen half what I have described, but for an old starched
gray-headed steward, who is as much an antiquity as any in the place,
and looks like an old family picture walked out of its frame. He
failed not, as we passed from room to room, to relate several memoirs
of the family; but his observations were particularly curious in the
cellar: he shewed where stood the triple rows of butts of sack, and
where were ranged the bottles of tent for toasts in the morning; he
pointed to the stands that supported the iron-hooped hogsheads of
strong beer; then stepping to a corner, he lugged out the tattered
fragment of an unframed picture: "This," says he, with tears in his
eyes, "was poor Sir Thomas, once master of all the drink I told you
of: he had two sons (poor young masters!) that never arrived to the
age of his beer; they both fell ill in this very cellar, and never
went out upon their own legs." He could not pass by a broken bottle
without taking it up to show us the arms of the family on it. He then
led me up the tower, by dark winding stone steps, which landed us into
several little rooms, one above the other; one of these was nailed up,
and my guide whispered to me the occasion of it. It seems the course
of this noble blood was a little interrupted about two centuries ago
by a freak of the Lady Frances, who was here taken with a neighboring
prior; ever since which the room has been nailed up, and branded with
the name of the adultery-chamber. The ghost of Lady Frances is
supposed to walk here: some prying maids of the family formerly
reported that they saw a lady in a farthingale through the keyhole;
but this matter was hushed up, and the servants forbid to talk of it.

I must needs have tired you with this long letter; but what engaged me
in the description was a generous principle to preserve the memory of
a thing that must itself soon fall to ruin; nay, perhaps, some part of
it before this reaches your hands: indeed, I owe this old house the
same sort of gratitude that we do to an old friend that harbors us in
his declining condition, nay, even in