ss, and in the centre the monument to Byron's favorite dog,
Bowswain. All was silent about the ruin, except the cawing of a thousand
rooks, who were settling themselves for the night with a vast amount of
noise and bustle on the high branches of the old trees which sweep down
on one side of the Abbey.

The residence which adjoins the church, once a monastery, was inherited
by Lord Byron, with the title: to part with it was a dire necessity.
Colonel Wildman, the school-fellow of Byron at Harrow, purchased the
estate from the unhappy poet in the most liberal and generous manner,
and blessed it into a home. On entering the house, we were shown through
long corridors and vaulted passages, in which the monastic character of
the building was preserved. When Byron came to Newstead from college,
the Abbey was in a most dilapidated condition, and he had only means
enough to make a few rooms habitable for himself and his mother. A
gloomy and desolate abode it must have been. The furniture of Byron's
bedroom remains as it stood when removed from Cambridge. On the walls
are prints of his school at Harrow, and Trinity College, with various
relics and boyish treasures. The window commands a view of the sheet of
water which stretches before the Abbey, with its wooded banks,--a scene
which he loves and remembers even when "Lake Leman wooes him with her
crystal face," for he writes to his sister,--

"It doth remind me of our own dear lake
By the old hall, which shall be mine no more."

Adjoining Byron's room is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in
his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most
appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These
rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that
one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great
drawing-room, once the dormitory of the monks, is now a splendid
apartment richly decorated; above the chimney is a fine portrait of
Lord Byron, and in an ancient cabinet was shown the cup made from a
skull found in one of the stone coffins near the Abbey church. It is
mounted in silver, and the well-known lines, written by Byron, are
engraved on the rim. "Having it made" was, as he said himself, "one of
his foolish freaks, of which he was ashamed." The cup, however, bears
little resemblance to a skull. Colonel Wildman preserved the furniture
of Byron's dining-room, and other apartments, (very simple it is,)
with