were very courteously received and entertained, but the difficulty was that Sir Thomas could neither speak Spanish nor French, and the visitors could not speak English.  In this dilemma he suddenly remembered a young kinsman of his, John Russel of Berwick House, Bridport, who had travelled extensively both in France and Spain, and he sent for him post-haste to come at once.  On receipt of the message young Russel lost no time, but riding at full gallop, soon arrived at Wolfeton House.  He was not only a good linguist, but also very good-looking, and the royal visitors were so charmed with him that when King Henry VII sent the Earl of Arundel with an escort to convey Philip and Joanna to see him at Windsor Castle, Russel went with them, and was introduced to King Henry by his royal guests as “a man of abilities, fit to stand before princes and not before meaner men.”  This was a good start for young Russel, and led to the King’s retaining him at Court.  He prospered greatly, rising high in office; and in the next reign, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, Russel came in for a handsome share of the spoils, including Woburn Abbey; he was created a peer, and so founded the great house of Bedford, made a dukedom in 1694 by William III.  One of his descendants, the third son of the sixth Duke of Bedford, was Lord John Russell (the name being then able to afford an extra letter), who brought the Great Reform Bill into Parliament in the year 1832.  He was Prime Minister then and in several subsequent Parliaments, and his name was naturally a household word all over the kingdom; but what made my brother more interested in this family was that as early as the year 1850 he was nicknamed “Lord John,” after Lord John Russell, who was then the Prime Minister.

We were now quite near Dorchester, but all we knew about that town previously was from a song that was popular in those days about “Old Toby Philpot,” whose end was recorded in the last verse, when—­

  His breath-doors of life on a sudden were shut,
  And he died full as big as a Dorchester butt!

Our expectations of finding a brewery there were fully realised, and, as anticipated, the butts we saw were of much larger dimensions, especially about the waist, than those we had seen farther north.  If “Toby” was of the same proportions as one of these he must have been quite a monstrosity.

We were surprised to find Dorchester such a clean and pretty town.  Seeing it was the county town of Dorset, one of the most ancient settlements in England, and the Durmovaria of the Romans, we expected to find some of those old houses and quaint passages so common to ancient county towns; but we learned that the old town had been destroyed by a fire in 1613, and long before that (in 1003) Dorchester had been burnt to the ground by the Danes.  It had also suffered from serious fires in 1622, 1725, and 1775, the last having been extinguished by the aid of Johnny Cope’s Regiment of Dragoons, who happened then to be quartered in the town.  But the great fire in 1613 must have been quite a fearful affair, as we saw a pamphlet written about it by an eye-witness, under the title of Fire from Heaven.  It gave such a graphic description of what such a fire was like, that we copied the following extract, which also displayed the quaint phraseology and spelling peculiar to that period: