ed of a series of small lattices.
You can fancy people stepping out from it upon the platform of the
staircase, whose rugged wooden logs, by way of steps, and solid,
deeply-guttered hand-rail, still remain. They looked down into the hall,
where, I take it, there was always a certain congregation of retainers,
much lounging and waiting and passing to and fro, with a door open into the
court. The court, as I said just now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot
which you may find it at present of a summer's day: there were beasts
tethered in it, and hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into
puddles. But my lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, could
pick out the man wanted and bawl down an order, with a threat to fling
something at his head if it were not instantly performed. The sight of the
groups on the floor beneath, the calling up and down, the oaken tables
spread, and the brazier in the middle,--all this seemed present again; and
it was not difficult to pursue the historic vision through the rest of the
building--through the portion which connected the great hall with the tower
(here the confederate of the sketching young lady without had set up the
peaceful three-legged engine of his craft); through the dusky, roughly
circular rooms of the tower itself, and up the corkscrew staircase of the
same to that most charming part of every old castle, where visions must
leap away off the battlements to elude you--the sunny, breezy platform at
the tower-top, the place where the castle-standard hung and the vigilant
inmates surveyed the approaches. Here, always, you really overtake the
impression of the place--here, in the sunny stillness, it seems to pause,
panting a little, and give itself up.

It was not only at Stokesay--I have written the name at last, and I will
not efface it--that I lingered a while on the quiet platform of the keep to
enjoy the complete impression so overtaken. I spent such another half hour
at Ludlow, which is a much grander and more famous monument. Ludlow,
however, is a ruin--the most impressive and magnificent of ruins. The
charming old town and the admirable castle form a capital object of
pilgrimage. Ludlow is an excellent example of a small English provincial
town that has not been soiled and disfigured by industry: I remember there
no tall chimneys and smoke-streamers, with their attendant purlieus and
slums. The little city is perched upon a hill near which the goodly Sev