of food, and a breviary.  A Roman Catholic school and presbytery now occupy its site.  It is a melancholy sight to see the “Wilderness” behind the house, still adorned with busts and urns, and the graves of favourite dogs, which still bear the epitaphs written by Cowper on Sir John Throckmorton’s pointer and Lady Throckmorton’s pet spaniel.  “Capability Brown” laid his rude, rough hand upon the grounds, but you can still see the “prosed alcove” mentioned by Cowper, a wooden summer-house, much injured

        By rural carvers, who with knives deface
        The panels, leaving an obscure rude name.

Sometimes, alas! the old house has to vanish entirely through old age.  It cannot maintain its struggle any longer.  The rain pours through the roof and down the insides of the walls.  And the family is as decayed as their mansion, and has no money wherewith to defray the cost of reparation.

[Illustration:  The Wardrobe House.  The Close.  Salisbury.  Evening.]

Our artist, Mr. Fred Roe, in his search for the picturesque, had one sad and deplorable experience, which he shall describe in his own words:—­

“One of the most weird and, I may add, chilling experiences in connection with the decline of county families which it was my lot to experience, occurred a year or two ago in a remote corner of the eastern counties.  I had received, through a friend, an invitation to visit an old mansion before the inmates (descendants of the owners in Elizabethan times) left and the contents were dispersed.  On a comfortless January morning, while rain and sleet descended in torrents to the accompaniment of a biting wind, I detrained at a small out-of-the-way station in ——­folk.  A weather-beaten old man in a patched great-coat, with the oldest and shaggiest of ponies and the smallest of governess-traps, awaited my arrival.  I, having wedged myself with the Jehu into this miniature vehicle, was driven through some miles of muddy ruts, until turning through a belt of wooded land the broken outlines of an extensive dilapidated building broke into view.  This was ——­ Hall.

“I never in my life saw anything so weirdly picturesque and suggestive of the phrase ‘In Chancery’ as this semi-ruinous mansion.  Of many dates and styles of architecture, from Henry VIII to George III, the whole seemed to breathe an atmosphere of neglect and decay.  The waves of affluence and successive rise of various members of the family could be distinctly traced in the enlargements and excrescences which contributed to the casual plan and irregular contour of the building.  At one part an addition seemed to denote that the owner had acquired wealth about the time of the first James, and promptly directed it to the enlargement of his residence.  In another a huge hall with classic brick frontage, dating from the commencement of the eighteenth century, spoke of an increase of affluence—­probably due to agricultural