sides of a spacious inner paved quadrangle called the
Inner Court, the fourth or eastern side being overshadowed by a beechen
grove. A square tower flanked each angle, and on both sides of the
south-western turret extended the commodious apartments of the
Stadholder. The great gateway on the south-west opened into a wide open
space called the Outer Courtyard. Along the north-west side a broad and
beautiful sheet of water, in which the walls, turrets, and chapel-spires
of the enclosed castle mirrored themselves, was spread between the mass
of buildings and an umbrageous promenade called the Vyverberg, consisting
of a sextuple alley of lime-trees and embowering here and there a stately
villa. A small island, fringed with weeping willows and tufted all over
with lilacs, laburnums, and other shrubs then in full flower, lay in the
centre of the miniature lake, and the tall solid tower of the Great
Church, surmounted by a light openwork spire, looked down from a little
distance over the scene.

It was a bright morning in May. The white swans were sailing tranquilly
to and fro over the silver basin, and the mavis, blackbird, and
nightingale, which haunted the groves surrounding the castle and the
town, were singing as if the daybreak were ushering in a summer festival.

But it was not to a merry-making that the soldiers were marching and the
citizens thronging so eagerly from every street and alley towards the
castle. By four o'clock the Outer and Inner Courts had been lined with
detachments of the Prince's guard and companies of other regiments to the
number of 1200 men. Occupying the north-eastern side of the court rose
the grim, time-worn front of the ancient hall, consisting of one tall
pyramidal gable of ancient grey brickwork flanked with two tall slender
towers, the whole with the lancet-shaped windows and severe style of the
twelfth century, excepting a rose-window in the centre with the decorated
mullions of a somewhat later period.

In front of the lower window, with its Gothic archway hastily converted
into a door, a shapeless platform of rough, unhewn planks had that night
been rudely patched together. This was the scaffold. A slight railing
around it served to protect it from the crowd, and a heap of coarse sand
had been thrown upon it. A squalid, unclean box of unplaned boards,
originally prepared as a coffin for a Frenchman who some time before had
been condemned to death for murdering the son of Goswyn Meursk