nted it told of his skill as a
sportsman. What giant logs might once have burned in the wide
fireplaces, what sounds of revelry have gone up to the bare rafters! Our
guide's tongue went glibly as she pointed out these familiar objects,
and in the kitchen, buttery, and wine-vault, which were situated
conveniently near to the dining-hall, she seemed equally at home. It was
easy to recognize in the great stone chimneys, with their heavy hooks
and cross-bars, symptoms of banquets for which bullocks were roasted
whole and sheep and calves slain by the dozen; but we needed her
practised lips to suggest the uses of the huge stone chopping-blocks,
the deeply sunk troughs, the narrow gutters that crossed the stone
pavement, all illustrative of the primitive days when butcher and cook
wrought simultaneously, and this contracted cellar served at once for
slaughter-house and kitchen. Her little airy figure was in strange
contrast with these gloomy passages, these stones that had reeked with
blood and smoke. She glided before us into the mysterious depths of the
storehouse and ale-vault, as the new moon glides among damp, black
clouds; as she directed our attention to the oaken cupboards for bread
and cheese, the stone benches that once supported long rows of casks,
the little wicket in the doorway, through which the butler doled out
provisions to a waiting crowd of poor, she might well have been likened
to a freshly trimmed lamp, lighting up the dark, mysterious past.

Freshly trimmed she unquestionably was, and by careful hands, but not a
voluntary light; for, the moment her explanations were finished, or our
curiosity satisfied, she sank into an indifference of speech and
attitude which proved her distaste to a place and a task utterly foreign
to her nature. Evidently, the hall which we had come so far to see, and
were so eager to explore, was at once the most familiar object of her
life and her most utter aversion. She had been drilled into a mechanical
knowledge of its history, but the place itself was to her what an old
grammar or spelling-book is to the unwilling pupil,--a thing to be
learned by rote, to be abused, contemned, escaped from. As we finished
our exploration of the lower floor, she probably breathed a sigh of
relief, feeling that the first chapter of her task was concluded.

But a second and more difficult was yet to follow,--for we now ascended
a staircase of uncemented blocks of stone, crossed a passage, and fou