apartment next to the ballroom is still known as Queen Elizabeth's Room, and here may yet be seen the suite of furniture made specially in honour of her visit and for her use. Her armchair is in the centre of the apartment, and by the aid of a portrait on the wall it is easy to recall the figure of the Virgin Queen and seat her once more in its capacious depths. Close by stands the card-table for which Elizabeth worked the embroidered top, and in front of that is the black velvet stool upon which Queen Victoria knelt at her coronation in Westminster Abbey. Other royal relics may be sought in the tiny Pages' Closet which opens off the Tapestry Room. This small chamber has now become the storeroom for the family china, and here are preserved Queen Elizabeth's dessert service and Queen Anne's breakfast set. The dessert service has for its ground color a lovely shade of green such as is not seen in modern china, and the breakfast set of Anne is of exquisite blue and white porcelain.

In the picture gallery, a noble apartment ninety feet in length, are sufficient objects of virtu to make the fame of two or three museums. Side by side may be seen a quaint old clock with a horizontal brass face and a curious old lamp which was intended to measure time rather than

Among the rich and rare collections of armour adorning the corridors and rooms of the mansion is Sidney's helmet, bearing his familiar porcupine crest, and elsewhere is to be seen a fragment of his shaving-glass, enclosed in a rude frame. Then there are numerous portraits of the hero, in one of which he has for companion his brother Robert, the first Earl of Leicester. Not less interesting are the portraits of his mother, Lady Mary Sidney, and that sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, for whose amusement in the time of her travail with her first-born he wrote his "Arcadia."

Each stately apartment of Penshurst is replete with historical relics. In the ballroom, which is the first to be visited, there is a bushel measure made from gun metal captured in the fight with the Spanish Armada, and overhead there hang three priceless chandeliers, the gift of Queen Elizabeth to Sir Henry Sidney. It is comforting to know that her Majesty did give Sir Henry something, for it is certain that his services on her behalf as Lord President of Wales and Lord Deputy of Ireland made him immensely poorer in worldly goods if they enriched him with honour. But it is probable that those chandeliers were much more than paid for by the hospitality Elizabeth received on her visit to Penshurst. The

approached from the east is known as "Saccharissa's Walk." It is to that avenue Waller alludes in the following lines:

"Ye lofty beeches, tell this matchless dame,
That if together ye fed all one flame,
It would not equalize the hundredth part
Of what her eyes have kindled in my heart!

Saccharissa, and Lady Dorothy Sidney has lost her title in her lover's endearing epithet. Over

the gateway of the inner courtyard is the window of "Saccharissa's Sitting-room," and the stately avenue of lofty beeches by which the mansion is

Nor should Algernon Sidney be forgotten. Next to Sir Philip he is the best known member of his famous house. Even in his youth he was credited with a "huge deal of wit and much sweetness of nature." Among the stanchest of his friends was William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and it was at Penshurst the two drew up between them the fundamental articles of the Pennsylvania constitution. He had bitter experience of the gratitude of kings. Two of Charles's children found a haven at Penshurst when the fortunes of the Royal house were wrecked by the Commonwealth, and a third, Charles II, rewarded the brutal Judge Jeffreys with a costly ring for his services at the mock trial which sent Algernon to the scaffold!

One other memory links itself with Penshurst, and this time it is a woman's fair form that fills the imagination. Algernon Sidney had a sister named Dorothy, and it was her fate to awaken a passionate love in the heart of Edmund Waller. He wooed her with all a poet's intensity, and bent his muse to the service of his desire. Penshurst and his poems perpetuate his passion to this day. In the affected language of the seventeenth century, he christened his ideal with the name of