egers. There are slits in the
outer walls for such peering, but they are noticeably broad and not
particularly oblique, and might easily have been applied to the uses of a
peaceful parley. This is part of the charm of the place: human life there
must have lost an earlier grimness: it was lived in by people who were
beginning to feel comfortable. They must have lived very much together:
that is one of the most obvious reflections in the court of a mediaeval
dwelling. The court was not always grassy and empty, as it is now, with
only a couple of gentlemen in search of impressions lying at their length,
one of whom has taken a wine-flask out of his pocket and has colored the
clear water drawn for them out of the well in a couple of tumblers by a
decent, rosy, smiling, talking old woman, who has come bustling out of the
gatehouse, and who has a large, dropsical, innocent husband standing about
on crutches in the sun and making no sign when you ask after his health.
This poor man has reached that ultimate depth of human simplicity at which
even a chance to talk about one's ailments is not appreciated. But the
civil old woman talks for every one, even for an artist who has come out of
one of the rooms, where I see him afterward reproducing its mouldering
quaintness. The rooms are all unoccupied and in a state of extreme decay,
though the castle is, as yet, far from being a ruin. From one of the
windows I see a young lady sitting under a tree across a meadow, with her
knees up, dipping something into her mouth. It is a camel's hair
paint-brush: the young lady is sketching. These are the only besiegers to
which the place is exposed now, and they can do no great harm, as I doubt
whether the young lady's aim is very good. We wandered about the empty
interior, thinking it a pity things should be falling so to pieces. There
is a beautiful great hall--great, that is, for a small castle (it would be
extremely handsome in a modern house)--with tall, ecclesiastical-looking
windows, and a long staircase at one end climbing against the wall into a
spacious bedroom. You may still apprehend very well the main lines of that
simpler life; and it must be said that, simpler though it was, it was
apparently by no means destitute of many of our own conveniences. The
chamber at the top of the staircase ascending from the hall is charming
still, with its irregular shape, its low-browed ceiling, its cupboards in
the walls, and its deep bay window form