on the occasion here in question. A number of tenants were
gathered together on the platform for the purpose of receiving the duke,
not with curses but with welcome; and as soon as he had descended from
the train an old woman rushed from the throng and very nearly embraced
him. "You dear old woman," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder,
"you dear old woman, how glad I am to see you again!"

St. Michael's Mount, though less remote than Dunrobin from the modern
world in some ways, is more visibly separated from it in another, being,
except at times of low tide, an island. It crowns and incases the summit
of a veritable island rock. The entrance to it is by a tower the bases
of which seem to descend from above and meet the visitor halfway as he
toils up a path apparently made for rabbits. Having mounted a hundred
stairs, the adventurer is in a comfortable hall, above which are the
dining room, once a monkish refectory, and an ancient church, now used
as a private chapel. One door of this hall gives access to a large
drawing-room, one of whose walls and whose fireplace have been carved
out of the living rock. Another gives access to a billiard room, below
which the Atlantic breaks at a depth of two hundred feet, and whose
granite balconies are grazed by the breasts of ascending sea birds.

Both these houses, which would constantly suggest to me, when I stayed
in them, the celebrated words of Keats:

Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

are, it is needless to say, exceptions rather than types. Of the others
which I may appropriately mention, a few may be taken as belonging to
an exceptional class also, on account of their unusual size; and these I
may again divide into genuine and ancient castles, as distinct from
modern imitations on the one hand, and what are properly palatial villas
of the classical type on the other; the remainder being smaller, though
often of great magnitude, and commonly known by such names as "halls,"
"parks," or "manors."

Of more or less genuine castles I have known a considerable number, many
of them much smaller than houses less ambitiously named; but, with the
possible exception of Alnwick, the interior of which is undisguisedly
modern, there is one which, in point of magnitude and continuity of
occupation, forms a class by itself. This castle is Raby, which has
never been uninhabited since the days of Stephen, when the first smoke
wreat