CHARLES II. IN DORSET. 23 



to which the abortive result of those wanderings necessitated a 

 return. Mr. Hughes, in the Boscobel Tracts (Ed. 1857, p. 

 103), gives a very good engraving of Trent House, and describes 

 the mansion as consisting of two different parts. " The front, 

 commonly selected as a point of view, is a heavy structure, 

 erected since the Restoration ; the back part looking into the 

 farmyard, and looking out on a range of massive old barns and 

 stabling, contains the important features which the engraving 

 represented. Over the projecting penthouse, into which the 

 kitchen door opens, are the windows of the bedchamber which 

 Lady Wyndham gave up to the King's use. This room evidently 

 was once connected with a smaller apartment in the projecting 

 wing marked by the massive stone window, of the shape and size 

 which proves it a hiding-place, and furnished with a double floor. 

 The situation of the latter is shown by a small garret window, 

 now boarded up, which furnished it with light and air j and it 

 probably communicated with a large dilapidated brew-house 

 beneath, from which the curious traveller must crawl up to it by 

 a ladder, to the great disarrangement of farming utensils and 

 roosting hens, as well as peril to his own clothes. The kitchen is 

 spacious and the fireplace baronial in its dimensions ; as might 

 therefore be expected, the farmer's wife points to the identical 

 spot where the King sat and turned the spit." Here I may 

 mention that the incident of the spit, or rather jack, did not 

 happen at Trent, as of course Mr. Hughes knew, but at 

 Mr. Tombs's house at Long Marston, near Stratford-on-Avon, 

 a house of which Mr. Hughes gives no description, though 

 it is still in existence, for I went over it only last mouth. 

 It boasts of a large stone chimney-stack, and, though there 

 are more recent additions to it, the greater part of the 

 building seems to be the same as it might well have been two 

 hundred years ago. The old kitchen (where the jack is still 

 religiously kept, secured in a glass case fastened on a beam, in a 

 corner of the ceiling nearest to the large open fireplace) is now 

 apparently used as a cider cellar. 



