small were the apertures,--sometimes merely slits and loopholes,
glimmering through many feet of thickness of stone. One of the towers
was said to have been the residence of Queen Eleanor; and this was better
lighted than the others, containing an oriel-window, looking out of a
little oratory, as it seemed to be, with groined arches and traces of
ornamental sculpture, so that we could dress up some imperfect image of a
queenly chamber, though the tower was roofless and floorless. There was
another pleasant little windowed nook, close beside the oratory, where
the Queen might have sat sewing or looking down the river Conway at the
picturesque headlands towards the sea. We imagined her stately figure in
antique robes, standing beneath the groined arches of the oratory. There
seem to have been three chambers, one above another, in these towers, and
the one in which was the embowed window was the middle one. I suppose
the diameter of each of these circular rooms could not have been more
than twenty feet on the inside. All traces of wood-work and iron-work
are quite gone from the whole castle. These are said to have been taken
away by a Lord Conway in the reign of Charles II. There is a grassy
space under the windows of Queen Eleanor's tower,--a sort of outwork of
the castle, where probably, when no enemy was near, the Queen used to
take the open air in summer afternoons like this. Here we sat down on
the grass of the ruined wall, and agreed that nothing in the world could
be so beautiful and picturesque as Conway Castle, and that never could
there have been so fit a time to see it as this sunny, quiet, lovely
afternoon. Sunshine adapts itself to the character of a ruin in a
wonderful way; it does not "flout the ruins gray," as Scott says, but
sympathizes with their decay, and saddens itself for their sake. It
beautifies the ivy too.

We saw, at the corner of this grass-plot around Queen Eleanor's tower, a
real trunk of a tree of ivy, with so stalwart a stem, and such a vigorous