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 mediæval
life. The place is a capital example of what the French call a small
_gentilhommière_ 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 besiegers. 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 mediæval
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