much dark oaken panelling and furniture. A fine carved bedstead is dated 1621. There are good paintings, some of them apparently by Lely and some much older. There is old stained glass in the long staircase window, and a curious wicket at the end of the house made of open ironwork.

We have to photograph, as usual, in a desperate hurry. The General seems to scorn our feeble work,

saying that he uses a Kodak and has his films developed for him. He says he has taken a trout rising at a fly, which makes me eagerly wish to see it, but we are told there was more water than trout when all was finished. The tale sounds fishy. I wonder whether any fish will show in our picture of the moat, and whether we shall have to pay the old gent. extra for them if they are well developed. There are many big trout plainly to be seen, they are fairly tame, lazily swimming around, and pro

WYTHALL

337 bably of one or two pounds weight. A quince or medlar hangs over the water. The many-gabled black and white house with stained and lichened roof is faithfully reflected in the placid water and backed by hills rising steeply behind it, all in verdure clad and bathed in the mist of a rich autumnal eve. We could not imagine a

more beautiful picture than our eleventh exposure, and as there was another plate it was a happy thought to take the same again with another lens. Therefore we reproduce two photographs from the one standpoint: one by a Dallmeyer's rapid, rectilinear lens; the other by a Wray's five-inch Platystigmat lens.

Then we pack and rush like fury. It is seventeen miles to Hereford station, and not quite two hours to the time of the express. We have to go cautiously through

Y

the dangerous, narrow, curved, steep streets of Ross, then comes a nice glide to Wilton Bridge, but after that four or five miles of almost constant uphill, a great deal of which we cannot ride. We comfort ourselves with the thought of the long descent of Aconbury, down which we flew before. Every mile I time and check, hopeful but not confident of the result, for at any time a puncture or slight accident would upset all our calculations; but all goes well. The last six miles take only half-an-hour, and the crowded streets of Hereford are safely traversed. Just in time to find the express twenty minutes late-a nice time for tea. Finally we arrive home all right, having been two hundred and twenty miles by rail, cycled nearly fifty miles, and taken twelve photographs- a very successful day's pilgrimage.

MANCHESTER

N these pilgrimages to old homes in many counties it would be a great omission if there were not some record of what is the oldest and by far the most

I

historical home in the city of which X and I are citizens, where we have striven for many years in summer's stifling heat and winter's dismal fog to earn our daily bread, as our fathers did before us.

On the very citadel of Manchester there still stands a solid stone house centuries older than any other in the neighbourhood. I know not what to call it. It is generally called Chetham's College or Hospital, but, in the usual meaning of the words, it is neither college nor hospital, and it was there for ages before Chethams were heard of. The original and local pronunciation of this name is as if it were spelt Cheetham, it being near Cheetham, now a crowded Jewry in the city, and the family name is not uncommon still. The older title of the house would be The Baron's Hall. Millions Millions go past

it unconscious of its existence. In the hurried race for wealth they have no time to spare to think of those whose toil has ended, no time for quietude in that dim and ghostly library, or in peace and calm amid the city's din to enjoy the works of those who have passed as shadows, age after age, as utterly forgotten as we all soon shall be.

If I as a stranger and pilgrim came to Manchester and strolled around her streets to read some little of her history, its ancient church above its filthy river would soon show whence it started. Then if some friend took me a few yards higher, and showed me another river,

filthier and fouler now than any Styx, flowing round a rocky corner into the former river, with steep banks of blocks of sandstone, there, I should say, was the original fortress of Manchester.

Primitive man always seized on any natural stronghold that there might be on which to dwell in safety. Here he would instinctively seize this rocky corner and dig a deep ditch from river to river to isolate his home. By the wall of Chetham's Library, which now stands on this site, a trench was lately dug. Seven feet below the ground a boulder-made Roman road was found, and four to five feet lower down was the moat or fosse of the Ancient Britons, silted up with sand containing seeds of elder, juniper, or bramble, all buried for two thousand years.

Here is testimony to the dual origin of the name of Manchester, for whatever changes there may have been it looks most probable that the first syllable is the Celtic maen or rock, the natural fortress forty feet above the rapid rivers which the Romans seized, and near to which they pitched their camp and left its name.

With apologies for this digression I would like to say that my previous books were partly written and published at my office in Hanging Ditch, Manchester, but within the past year both sides of Hanging Ditch have been utterly swept away. When the north side was being rebuilt for the new Corn Exchange, I could see from my window nearly all the line of semicircular moat that encompassed the first town of Manchester. I mean the much larger moat of the Normans, not the small dyke of the Britons. This moat would leave the river Irk (it should be Ink, it now runs under the railway), about Toad Lane or Todd Street, continuing at a great depth under Hanging Ditch, where I have seen it, under Hanging Bridge, a fourteenth century bridge lately uncovered, into the river Irwell. The enclosed site held The Baron's Hall, the town mill, hovels of serfs, and "th' owd" church. The alehouses that swarm