ere is something very fairy-like in the
cheerful voice of a bell sounding among the wilder scenes of nature,
particularly where Time advances his claim to the sovereignty of the
landscape; for the cheerfulness is a little ghostly, and might serve
well enough for a tocsin to the elvish hordes whom our footsteps may be
supposed to disturb.

An old woman, in the neat peasant dress of our country, when, taking a
little from the fashion of the last century (the cap and the kerchief),
it assumes no ungraceful costume,--replied to their summons. She was
the solitary cicerone of the place. She had lived there, a lone and
childless widow, for thirty years; and, of all the persons I have ever
seen, would furnish forth the best heroine to one of those pictures
of homely life which Wordsworth has dignified with the partriarchal
tenderness of his genius.

They wound a narrow passage, and came to the ruins of the great hall.
Its gothic arches still sprang lightly upward on either side; and,
opening a large stone box that stood in a recess, the old woman showed
them the gloves, and the helmet, and the tattered banners, which had
belonged to that Godolphin who had fought side by side with Sidney,
when he, whose life--as the noblest of British lyrists hath somewhere
said--was "poetry put into action,"(1) received his death-wound in the
field of Zutphen.

Thence they ascended by the dilapidated and crumbling staircase, to
a small room, in which the visitors were always expected to rest
themselves, and enjoy the scene in the garden below. A large chasm
yawned where the casement once was; and round this aperture the ivy
wreathed itself in fantastic luxuriance. A sort of ladder, suspended
from this chasm to the ground, afforded a convenience for those who were
tempted to a short excursion by the view without.

And the view _was_ tempting! A smooth green lawn, surrounded by shrubs
and flowers, was ornamented in the centre by a fountain. The waters
were, it is true, dried up; but the basin, and the "Triton with his
wreathed shell," still remained. A little to the right was an old
monkish sun-dial; and through the green vista you caught the glimpse of
one of those gray, grotesque statues with which the taste of Elizabeth's
day shamed the classic chisel.

There was something quiet and venerable about the whole place; and when
the old woman said to Constance, "Would you not like, my lady, to walk
down and look at the sun-dial and the fount