The Master’s residence, forming one entire side of the quadrangle, fronts on the garden, and wears an aspect at once stately and homely.  It can hardly have undergone any perceptible change with in three centuries; but the garden, into which its old windows look, has probably put off a great many eccentricities and quaintnesses, in the way of cunningly clipped shrubbery, since the gardener of Queen Elizabeth’s reign threw down his rusty shears and took his departure.  The present Master’s name is Harris; he is a descendant of the founder’s family, a gentleman of independent fortune, and a clergyman of the Established Church, as the regulations of the hospital require him to be.  I know not what are his official emoluments; but, according to all English precedent, an ancient charitable fund is certain to be held directly for the behoof of those who administer it, and perhaps incidentally, in a moderate way, for the nominal beneficiaries; and, in the case before us, the brethren being so comfortably provided for, the Master is likely to be at least as comfortable as all the twelve together.  Yet I ought not, even in a distant land, to fling an idle gibe against a gentleman of whom I really know nothing, except that the people under his charge bear all possible tokens of being tended and cared for as sedulously as if each of them sat by a warm fireside of his own, with a daughter bustling round the hearth to make ready his porridge and his titbits.  It is delightful to think of the good life which a suitable man, in the Master’s position, has an opportunity to lead,—­linked to time-honored customs, welded in with an ancient system, never dreaming of radical change, and bringing all the mellowness and richness of the past down into these railway-days, which do not compel him or his community to move a whit quicker than of yore.  Everybody can appreciate the advantages of going ahead; it might be well, sometimes, to think whether there is not a word or two to be said in favor of standing still, or going to sleep.

From the garden we went into the kitchen, where the fire was burning hospitably, and diffused a genial warmth far and wide, together with the fragrance of some old English roast-beef, which, I think must at that moment have been nearly to a turn.  The kitchen is a lofty, spacious, and noble room, partitioned off round the fireplace by a sort of semicircular oaken screen, or, rather, an arrangement of heavy and high-backed settles, with an ever open entrance between them, on either side of which is the omnipresent image of the Bear and Ragged Staff, three feet high, and excellently carved in oak, now black with time and unctuous kitchen-smoke.  The ponderous mantel-piece, likewise of carved oak, towers high towards the dusky ceiling, and extends its mighty breadth to take in a vast area of hearth, the arch of the fireplace being positively so immense that I could compare it to nothing but the city-gateway.  Above its cavernous opening