ammar or
arithmetic. The new-fangled notions of a Yankee school-committee would
madden many a pedagogue, and shake down the roof of many a time-honored
seat of learning, in the mother-country.

At this point, however, we will turn back, in order to follow up the
other road from Leamington, which was the one that I loved best to take.
It pursues a straight and level course, bordered by wide gravel-walks
and overhung by the frequent elm, with here a cottage and there a villa,
on one side a wooded plantation, and on the other a rich field of grass
or grain, until, turning at right angles, it brings you to an arched
bridge over the Avon. Its parapet is a balustrade carved out of
freestone, into the soft substance of which a multitude of persons have
engraved their names or initials, many of them now illegible, while
others, more deeply cut, are illuminated with fresh green moss. These
tokens indicate a famous spot; and casting our eyes along the smooth
gleam and shadow of the quiet stream, through a vista of willows that
droop on either side into the water, we behold the gray magnificence of
Warwick Castle, uplifting itself among stately trees, and rearing its
turrets high above their loftiest branches. We can scarcely think the
scene real, so completely do those machicolated towers, the long line of
battlements, the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out
our indistinct ideas of the antique time. It might rather seem as if the
sleepy river (being Shakspeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror
of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that
stood here many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened,
when you observe that the image in the tranquil water has all the
distinctness of the actual structure. Either might be the reflection of
the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the
mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so
perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower
one an old stronghold of feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in an
enchanted river.

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that projects from the bank a little on
the hither side of the castle, has the effect of making the scene appear
more entirely apart from the every-day world, for it ends abruptly in
the middle of the stream,--so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and
ladies of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never
tr