of the Mersey near to Barlow Hall. The main army built and crossed by the first bridge over the Mersey between Didsbury and Cheadle. The Barlows seem to have again got into trouble over the Stuart cause. In fact their troubles and persecutions thickened. In 1734 I find mention of a dispute about "the consecrated goods or ornaments in the Popish chapel at Barlow." In 1785, at the Bull's Head, in Manchester, the Manor or Lordship of Barlow, with the hall, &c., was offered for sale at auction. Samuel Egerton of Tatton, who bought it, was the sole acting executor of the last Barlow of Barlow, a family who had held the estate for five hundred years. Its recent rise in value, the unearned increment, should exceed the wildest dreams of avarice.

On the 10th September 1893, the anniversary of the martyrdom, a throng of genuine Catholic pilgrims visited the hall. Its last bit of notoriety has arisen from its having been the Manchester home of Sir William Cunliffe Brooks, a thorough Lancashire man, some of whose relatives tried to prove that he was a Scotchman after he was safely dead.

At the sale of his furniture and goods at Barlow Hall there was a lot of twenty-two stall-ends with handsomely carved heads, made from old English oak nearly three inches thick. X bought them unseen, gave them to me, and now they are round the little entrance-hall and stairs of my home. I try to "make-believe" they have some connection with what was once the Barlow Chapel in the old church across the garden from where I now write. They make the staircase narrower, and the cheerful remark of X when he saw them there was: "How will they get your coffin down? They will have to up-end you."

There is some old oak in this house, but it has been mostly hidden, cased or plastered over and whitewashed.

When I wanted more to match these stall-ends it was impossible to get any old English oak. There was plenty of foreign and some new, but for the genuine article we had to saw up old beams that I had saved from the clerk's house. When the work was finished I was told of two farmhouses that were to be pulled down immediately. One was called The Broad Oak. It was about half-a-mile off, near to the river Mersey, where once there was a ferry. A new branch railway was passing over the site and the house must be cleared away at once. I bought a dozen good sound oak beams, about twelve to fifteen feet in length and perhaps two hundred years old, for twenty-five shillings.

I had also had a fancy to have oaken balusters of two spirals winding round one another but not touching each other, something like the ancient carvings. It proved quite impossible to get these of English make, unless at the prohibitive price of £2 each; but in America they could be made for a dollar, because there they use machinery.

It seems to me that anything in old English oak must advance enormously in value, for the supply will fail and there is no wood exactly like it. We see it in country places in profusion and wasted, but you cannot buy any. Every old house even in Didsbury was built of oak, and some of them are worth pulling down for the sake of it. There will soon be very few left. I was once in a thatched cottage talking to a neighbour of old times, and remarked that he had some nice old furniture.

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Aye," he said, "but th' best cheers are in th' bedroom, they were th' Mosley's cheers, Lords o' th' manor. They come out o' what's now the Wesleyan college, my wife's fayther had 'em, but I dun know what we keepen 'em for." He brought me one down, and said that I could have them for "hafe a suvrin each." We already had a fine mahogany wardrobe, four-post bedstead, and chest

of drawers, bought at the same sale nearly a century ago, when the new hall was being converted into a ladies' boarding-school. It was subsequently bought by the Wesleyan Methodists for a training college for ministers. I sent for the chairs and here is a photograph of one. A cabinetmaker lately told me that some like it had sold at Lord Wilton's sale at Heaton Hall for 20 each. He thought that an excessive price, but he would not mind giving £7 each.

ABNEY HALL

Τ'

HE last home to have its record in this book is the home of X. It is not very old, but as X has lived there for more than fifty years, perhaps it is old enough to qualify. In these hurrying march-of-intellect days there are not many men who live fifty years in one house. They flit, or get wed, or richer, or poorer, or go hence, or something happens to them long before the snows of fifty winters have whitened them. A cottage by my gate has only had two tenants in one hundred years, but it is close to the churchyard, where they get used to long tenancies. The last tenant, after being a bellringer for nearly seventy years, dug his own grave in the gravel of the cellar, under his hand-loom, quite shocking the parson. When he had to drink water he preferred it from the Holy Well, which probably filters from the graves and has some body in it. As X is very careful of what he drinks it may be hoped he will attain to the ninety-two years of his grandfather, John Watts, who with generations of his forefathers is buried in this churchyard of Didsbury.

Abney Hall was originally planned on a magnificent scale, by or for one who like many others was not able to finish. Folklorists know full well how those who build fine houses quickly end their days. In this one a corner was hurriedly made ready so that the owner might die in peace. In olden times the proverb grew, "Fools build houses, wise men live in them;" but our modern jerrybuilders are reversing that, they wax fat, and softly say among themselves, "We build houses, fools live in them."

When Abney Hall, with its deeply sculptured stone and massive oak, was lying derelict, X's father bought it

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