of the great staircase. These two brothers had taken different sides in the struggle then going on, and quarrelled so bitterly that they agreed never to speak to one another, living actually in different parts of the then much larger house, and only using this staircase in common as they retired to or descended from their particular apartments. One night, by evil chance, they met upon the stairs. None knew what passed between them, or whether black looks or bitter words were exchanged; but as the Cavalier passed, his Puritan brother drew a dagger and stabbed him in the back. He fell, and died on the spot, and the stains of his blood are there to this day-visible, indubitably, to one's own physical eyes. The good people-farming folks from Westmoreland-who lately occupied the house, showed the stranger these stains, outside what is known as the bedroom of "Bad Sir Giles," who, to quote "The Spectre of Tappington," "had been a former proprietor in the days of Elizabeth. Many a dark and dismal tradition is yet extant of the licentiousness of his life and the enormity of his offences. The Glen, which the keeper's daughter was seen to enter, but never known to quit, still frowns darkly as of yore; while an ineradicable blood-stain on the oaken stair yet bids defiance to the united energies of soap and sand. But it is with one particular apartment that a deed of more especial atrocity is said to be connected. A stranger guest-so runs the legend-arrived unexpectedly at the mansion of the Bad Sir Giles.' They met in apparent friendship; but the ill-concealed scowl on their master's brow told the domestics that the visit was not a welcome one.' Next morning, the stranger was found dead in his bed, with marks of violence on his body. He was buried in Denton churchyard, on the other side of the highway to Folkestone. For the rest of the tale, and how the spectre was supposed to have purloined Lieutenant Seaforth's breeches, the Ingoldsby Legends themselves must be consulted. Tappington has again passed away from the Barhams. Ingoldsby's son, the Reverend Richard Harris Dalton Dalton Barham, Barham, Vicar of Lolworth, Cambridgeshire, resigned that living in 1876, and retired to Dawlish, South Devon, where he died in 1886; but considerably earlier than that date he had agreed, having no children, to sell the property and divide the proceeds with his two sisters. This was accordingly done. Although the scenery is so sweetly beautiful, the soil is said to be very poor-mostly unfertile red earth, mixed with great quantities of flints, the rest chalk. A great extent of the property is still coppice and scrubwood. An advertisement of 1890, offering the place to be let, is interesting: FARM.-KENT.-Tappington Everard, Denton, near Canterbury, comprising Homestead, with Picturesque Residence (formerly occupied by the Rev. R. H. Barham, author of the Ingoldsby Legends) and about 245 Acres of Land, of which 144 Acres are Pasture, and 101 Acres Arable. Rent £220. Early possession may be had.— For terms and further particulars apply to Messrs. Worsfold & Hayward, Land Agents, Dover, and 80, Cannon Street, London, E.C. CHAPTER VI ROMNEY MARSH recent THE Scene now changes to Romney Marsh. It was in 1817, in his twenty-ninth year, that Barham came to this recondite region, the Archbishop of Canterbury having collated him to the rectory of Snargate, with which went at that time, by some mysterious ecclesiastical jugglery that does not concern us, the curacy of the parish of Warehorne. He lived by preference there, rather than in the malarious marsh itself, at Snargate, and thus the vicarage house that stands, amid a melancholy plantation of larches, to the left of the road on entering the village, has its interest, for we may suppose that in it he lived, although, to be sure, it has undergone alterations, and its stuccoed abominations and feeble attempts at Gothic design must be later than his day. It is a disappointing house to the literary pilgrim who loves his Barham -gaunt and dismal-looking as you pass it; but the site is interesting, for we must by no means forget that it was here, driven to it by the weariness of being confined to the house after breaking his leg in a gig accident, in 1819, that he turned to literary composition. A novel called Baldwin was the result. It was published anonymously, and was not-nor, as a perusal of it satisfies one, did it deserve to be-a success. He was only serving his apprenticeship to letters, and had not yet discovered himself. That he speedily improved upon this first effort becomes evident in his succeeding work, begun immediately after the completion of the first. This, partly written here, was the novel of My Cousin Nicholas, a work of splendid and rollicking humour now undeservedly forgotten. Before he had finished the manuscript a change came over his professional prospects, for in 1821 he was induced to apply for a minor canonry of St. Paul's Cathedral, and when, to his surprise, he was elected, removed to London, and neither Warehorne nor Snargate knew him any more. Those who make this pilgrimage will think his unbounded joy at leaving his country cure perhaps a little indecent : Oh, I'll be off! I will, by Jove! No more by purling streams I'll ramble, Bemired, and scratched by briar and bramble. He was eager for London, and preferment. As for Warehorne itself, it is one of those smallest of villages with the biggest of churches which give the stranger the alternatives of supposing either that it has decayed from some former prosperity or that the piety of whoever built the big church outran his discretion. Perhaps he who originally built it was a sinner of more than usual calibre, the magnitude of whose misdeeds is thus feebly reflected to after ages in this architectural expiation. It is a thought of one's very own, but essentially Barhamesque |