the
nation's life and manners between them, as this hall and that of
Chatsworth. It was built, of course, in the bow-and-arrow times,
when the sun had to use the same missiles in shooting its barbed
rays into the narrow apertures of old castles--or the stone coffins
of fear-hunted knights and ladies, as they might be called. What a
monument this to the dispositions and habits of the world, outside
and inside, of that early time! Here is the porter's or warder's
lodge just inside the huge gate. To think of a living being with a
human soul in him burrowing in such a place!--a big, black
sarcophagus without a lid to it, set deep in the solid wall. Then
there is the chapel. Compare it with that of Chatsworth, and you
may count almost on your fingers the centuries that have intervened
between them. It was new-roofed soon after the discovery of
America, and perhaps done up to some show of decency and comfort.
But how small and rude the pulpit and pews--looking like rough-
boarded potato-bins! Here is the great banquet-hall, full to
overflowing with the tracks and cross-tracks of that wild, strange
life of old. There is a fire-place for you, and a mark in the
chimney-back of five hundred Christmas logs. Doubtless this great
stone pavement of a floor was carpeted with straw at these banquets,
after the illustrious Becket's pattern. Here is a memento of the
feast hanging up at the top of the kitchenward door;--a pair of
roughly-forged, rusty handcuffs amalgamated into one pair of jaws,
like a musk-rat trap. What was the use of that thing, conductor?
"That, sir, they put the 'ands in of them as shirked and didn't
drink up all the wine as was poured into their cups, and there they
made them stand on tiptoe up against that door, sir, before all the
company, sir, until they was ashamed of theirselves." Descend into
the kitchen, all scarred with the tremendous cookery of ages. Here
they roasted bullocks whole, and just back in that dark vault with a
slit or two in it for the light, they killed and dressed them.
There are the relics of the shambles. And here is the great form on
which they cut them up into manageable pieces. It would do you
good, you Young America, to see that form, and the cross-gashes of
the meat-axe in it. It is the half of a gigantic English oak, which
was growing in Julius Caesar's time, sawed through lengthwise,
making a top surface several feet wide, black and smooth as ebony.
Some of the bar
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