barley and grass.  This part of Cheshire has hardly more diversity in its river-scenery, but the mere presence of trees and green arbors makes it a pleasant picture, while here and there, as at Overton (this is Welsh, however, and belongs to Flintshire), a church-tower comes in to complete the scene.  Here the Dee winds about a good deal, and receives its beautiful, dashing tributary, the Alyn, which runs through the Vale of Gresford and waters the park of Trevallyn Old Hall, one of the loveliest of old English homes.  Its pointed gables and great clustering stacks of chimneys, its mullioned and diamond-paned windows, its finely-wooded park, all realize the stranger’s ideal of the antique manor-house.  This neighborhood is studded with country-houses in all styles of architecture, from the characteristic national to the uncomfortable and cold foreign type.  Houses that were meant to stand in ilex-groves under a purple sky and a sun of bronze look forlorn and uninviting under the gray sky of England and amid its trees leafless for so many months in the year:  home associations seem impossible in a porticoed house suggestive of outdoor living and the relegation of chambers to the use of a mere refuge from the weather.  For many of these places are no more than villas enlarged, and might be set down with advantage to themselves in the Regent’s Park in London, the very acme of the commonplace.  On the other hand, all the traditional associations that go with an English hall presuppose a national style of architecture.  Even florid Tudor, even sturdy “Queen Anne,” can stand juxtaposition with groups of horses, dogs and huntsmen; Christmas cheer and Christmas weather set them off all the better; leafless trees are no drawback; the house looks warmer, coseyer, more home-like, the worse the blast and rush without.  A roaring fire is natural to the huge hall fireplace, while in a mosaic-paved “ante-room” or a frescoed “saloon” it looks foreign and out of place.  Many an odd Welsh and English house has unfortunately disappeared to make room for a cold, unsuccessful monstrosity that reminds one of a mammoth railway-station or a new hotel; and when Welsh names are tacked on to these absurd dwellings the contrast is as painful as it is forcible.  Such, for instance, is Bryn-y-Pys, on the Dee—­a house you might guess to belong to a Liverpool merchant who had trusted to a common builder for a comfortable home.  Overton Cottage, on the other side, fills in with its walks and plantations an abrupt bend of the river, and the view from the up-going road at its back is very lovely, though the scene is purely pastoral.  Overton Churchyard is one of the “seven wonders” of North Wales:  it has a very trim and stately appearance, not that ragged, free if melancholy, outspreadedness which distinguishes many country cemeteries, that unpremeditated luxuriance of creepers and flowers, blossoming bushes and grasses, that make up at least half of one’s pleasant reminiscences of such