far and wide, and devoted to uses which they scarcely honor. You
will see the well-faced stones for miles around, in garden walls,
pavements, cottage hearths and chimneys, in stables and cow-houses.
In Oundle, the principal hotel, a large castellated building, shows
its whole front built of them.

The great lion of Stamford is the Burghley House, the palace of the
Marquis of Exeter. It may be called so without exaggeration of its
magnificence as a building or of the extent and grandeur of its
surroundings. The edifice itself would cut up into nearly half a
dozen "White Houses," such as we install our American Presidents in
at Washington. Certainly, in any point of view, it is large and
splendid enough for the residence of an emperor and his suite. Its
towers, turrets and spires present a picturesque grove of
architecture of different ages, and its windows, it is said, equal
in number all the days of the year. It was not open to the public
the day I was in Stamford, so I could only walk around it and
estimate its interior by its external grandeur.

But there was an outside world of architecture in the park of
sublimer features to me than even the great palace itself, with all
its ornate and elaborate sculpture. It was the architecture of the
majestic elms and oaks that stood in long ranks and folded their
hands, high up in the blue sky, above the finely-gravelled walks
that radiated outward in different directions. They all wore the
angles and arches of the Gothic order and the imperial belt of
several centuries. I walked down one long avenue and counted them
on either side. There were not sixty on both; yet their green and
graceful roofage reached a full third of a mile. Not sixty to
pillar and turn such an arch as that! I sat down on a seat at the