undred yards; sufficiently
wide to place it, in the days of cross-bows and ballistas, pretty well
beyond the reach of insult, but by far too narrow to be of the
slightest avail against cannon, and even musketry. In the face of the
rock a staircase is cut, by which you ascend to a door, of which the
key is kept at a cottage close by, where dwells also your cicerone, or
guide. The door being opened, you see before you a continuation of the
rocky staircase; with this difference in character, however, between
what is passed and what is to come,--that whereas you mounted to the
threshold under the canopy of heaven, you now move onwards, or rather
upwards, through a cavity cut in the face of the solid stone itself.
By-and-bye you come to a landing-place, beyond which, at the extremity
of a narrow passage, you behold what used to be the armoury of the
castle,--an arched hall, chiselled out, like the gallery which leads to
it, from the rock. Here are yet the grooves and niches within which
warriors, long since dead, used to suspend their spears and
battle-axes, their helmets and coats of mail; and here, in the face of
the stone, are chiselled out some armorial bearings; probably the
devices worn by the lord of the castle on his shield. We find a tiger
couchant, for example, not ungracefully executed; a gate or portcullis,
I believe in heraldry an honourable device; with the fragments of what
have evidently been other symbols, though time has laid on them his
defacing fingers so effectually that you cannot trace them out.

From the armoury you proceed round a curvature in the rock, which
conducts you into the open air, and gives you a view of the opposite
fells, to the dungeon,--a melancholy place, bearing to this hour
numberless records of the sufferings and the patience, and even the
ingenuity, of those by whom, in old times, it was tenanted. The late
Count Kinsky, the proprietor of the castle, caused a breach to be made
in the side of the dungeon, which you now enter through an arched
passage in the rock, though originally the captive was let down by a
rope from above. This arrangement has the two-fold effect of admitting
an increase of light into the den, and of affording a ready means of
access to such as might scruple to descend, collier-fashion, in a
basket. Having passed beneath the arch, you find yourself in a circular
cell some twenty feet or more beneath the surface of the earth, and
girdled in by walls of solid rock,