The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windsor Castle, by William Harrison Ainsworth

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Title: Windsor Castle

Author: William Harrison Ainsworth

Posting Date: January 10, 2009 [EBook #2866]
Release Date: October, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDSOR CASTLE ***

Produced by Grant Macandrew

WINDSOR CASTLE

By William H. Ainsworth

"About, about!
Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out."

SHAKESPEARE, Merry Wives of Windsor

"There is an old tale goes, that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner:
You have heard of such a spirit; and well you know,
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth."--ibid

WINDSOR CASTLE

BOOK I. ANNE BOLEYN

I.

Of the Earl of Surrey's solitary Ramble in the Home Park--Of
the Vision beheld by him in the Haunted Dell--And of his
Meeting with Morgan Fenwolf, the Keeper, beneath Herne's
Oak.

In the twentieth year of the reign of the right high and puissant King
Henry the Eighth, namely, in 1529, on the 21st of April, and on one
of the loveliest evenings that ever fell on the loveliest district in
England, a fair youth, having somewhat the appearance of a page, was
leaning over the terrace wall on the north side of Windsor Castle, and
gazing at the magnificent scene before him. On his right stretched the
broad green expanse forming the Home Park, studded with noble trees,
chiefly consisting of ancient oaks, of which England had already learnt
to be proud, thorns as old or older than the oaks, wide-spreading
beeches, tall elms, and hollies. The disposition of these trees was
picturesque and beautiful in the extreme. Here, at the end of a sweeping
vista, and in the midst of an open space covered with the gre