size, where, no doubt, the skull-goblet has often
gone its rounds. Colonel Wildman's dining-room was once Byron's
shooting-gallery, and the original refectory of the monks. It is now
magnificently arranged, with a vaulted roof, a music-gallery at one end,
suits of armor and weapons on the walls, and mailed arms extended, holding
candelabras.

We parted with the housekeeper, and I with a good many shillings, at the
door by which we entered; and our next business was to see the private
grounds and gardens. A little boy attended us through the first part of
our progress, but soon appeared the veritable gardener--a shrewd and
sensible old man, who has been very many years on the place. There was
nothing of special interest as concerning Byron until we entered the
original old monkish garden, which is still laid out in the same fashion
as the monks left it, with a large oblong piece of water in the center,
and terraced banks rising at two or three different stages with perfect
regularity around it; so that the sheet of water looks like the plate of
an immense looking-glass, of which the terraces form the frame. It seems
as if, were there any giant large enough, he might raise up this mirror
and set it on end.

In the monks' garden, there is a marble statue of Pan, which the gardener
told us, was brought by the "Wicked Lord" (great-uncle of Byron) from
Italy, and was supposed by the country people to represent the devil, and
to be the object of his worship--a natural idea enough, in view of his
horns and cloven feet and tail, tho this indicates at all events, a very
jolly devil. There is also a female statue, beautiful from the waist
upward, but shaggy and cloven-footed below, and holding a little
cloven-footed child by the hand. This, the old gardener assured us was
Pandora, wife of the above-mentioned Pan, with her son. Not far from this
spot, we came to the tree on which Byron carved his own name and that of
his sister Augusta. It is a tree of twin stems,--a birch-tree, I
think--growing up side by side. One of the stems still lives and
flourished, but that on which he carved the two names is quite dead, as if
there had been something fatal in the inscription that has made it for
ever famous. The names are still very legible, altho the letters had been
closed up by the growth of the bark before the tree died. They must have
been deeply cut at first.

There are old yew-trees of unknown antiquity in this garden, and many
o