e curious student of history--a study,
perhaps, too little in vogue with us--could find no better example of
the palace of an old feudal lord. Dating almost from the time of the
first George--and some even say it was built by the same Wren who
designed that St. Paul's Cathedral whose ruins we may still see to the
east of London--it frowned upon the miles of private park surrounding
it, a marble memorial of feudal monopoly and man's selfish greed. The
very land about it, to an extent of almost half a county, was owned by
the owners of the castle, and by them rented out upon an annual payment
to such farmers as they chose to favor with a chance to earn their
bread.

In an ancient room of a still older house which stands some two miles
from the castle, and had formerly been merely the gatekeeper's lodge
(though large enough for several families), a young man was sitting,
one late afternoon in early November. The room was warmed by a fire, in
the old fashion; and the young man was gloomily plunging the poker into
the coals, breaking them into oily flakes which sent out fierce
flickerings as they burned away. He was dressed in a rough shooting suit
of blue velveteen, and his heavy American shoes were crusted with mud.
His handsome, boyish face wore an expression of deep anxiety; and his
hands seemed to minister to the troubles of his meditation by tumbling
his hair about the contracted forehead, while his lips closed about a
short brier-wood pipe of a kind only used by men. The pipe had gone out,
unnoticed by the smoker; and he did not seem to mind the fierce heat
thrown out by the broken coals. Above the mantel was the portrait of a
gentleman in the quaint costume of the latter Victorian age; the absurd
starched collar and shirt, the insignificant cravat, the trousers
reaching to the ankles, and the coat and waistcoat of black cloth and
fantastic cut, familiar to the readers of the London _Punch_. This
antedated worthy looked out from the canvas upon the room as if he owned
it; and the mullioned windows and carved oak wainscoting justified his
claim, even to the very books in the bookcases, which showed an
antiquarian taste. Here were the strange old-fashioned satires of
Thackeray and the more modern romances of the humorist Dickens; the
crude speculations of the philosopher Spencer, and the one-sided,
aristocratic economies of Malthus and Mill; with the feeble rhymes of
Lord Tennyson d'Eyncourt, which men, in a time-servin