r'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 the mark in
the chimney-back of five hundred Christmas logs. Doubtless this great
stone pavement of a floor was carpeted with straw at 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 muskrat 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 drest them. There are 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 ax 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 bark still
clings to the under side. The dancing-hall is the great room of the
building. All that the taste, art and wealth of that day could do, was
done to make it a splendid apartment, and it would pass muster still as a
comfortable and respectable salon. As we pass out, you may decipher the
short prayer cut in the wasting stone over a side portal, "God Save the
Vernons." I hope this prayer has been favorably answered; for history
records much virtue in the family, mingled with