down the miniature cloister before you pass in: it seems
wonderfully old and queer. Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you
find modern conversation and late publications and the prospect of dinner.
The new life and the old have melted together: there is no dividing-line.
In the drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end
inward, like a small casemate. You ask a lady what it is, but she doesn't
know. It is something of the monks: it is a mere detail. After dinner you
are told that there is of course a ghost--a gray friar who is seen in the
dusky hours at the end of passages. Sometimes the servants see him, and
afterward go surreptitiously to sleep in the town. Then, when you take your
chamber-candle and go wandering bedward by a short cut through empty rooms,
you are conscious of a peculiar sensation which you hardly know whether to
interpret as a desire to see the gray friar or as an apprehension that you
will see him.

A friend of mine, an American, who knew this country, had told me not to
fail, while I was in the neighborhood, to go to S----. "Edward I. and
Elizabeth," he said, "are still hanging about there." Thus admonished, I
made a point of going to S----, and I saw quite what my friend meant.
Edward I. and Elizabeth, indeed, are still to be met almost anywhere in the
county: as regards domestic architecture, few parts of England are still
more vividly Old English. I have rarely had, for a couple of hours, the
sensation of dropping back personally into the past in a higher degree than
while I lay on the grass beside the well in the little sunny court of this
small castle, and idly appreciated the still definite details of mediaeval
life. The place is a capital example of what the French call a small
_gentilhommiere_ of the thirteenth century. It has a good deep moat, now
filled with wild verdure, and a curious gatehouse of a much later
period--the period when the defensive attitude had been wellnigh abandoned.
This gatehouse, which is not in the least in the style of the habitation,
but gabled and heavily timbered, with quaint cross-beams protruding from
surfaces of coarse white stucco, is a very picturesque anomaly in regard to
the little gray fortress on the other side of the court. I call this a
fortress, but it is a fortress which might easily have been taken, and it
must have assumed its present shape at a time when people had ceased to
peer through narrow slits at possible besi