The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 | Page 9

feet of
space walled in by stone and mortar. But Fancy had the power to
enliven, furnish, people them. She suggested that their very number
was an indication of sociability, excitement, noise, and mirth. Here, as
in all feudal dwellings, the vast disproportion between the space
allotted to the dependents and that reserved for the lord of the manor
pointed to the time when each castle was a walled city, each baronial
hall the home of a crowd of petty retainers. In that long-ago, what
multitudes of voices had stirred the silence of the court-yard! The bare
walls of the apartments then were hung with breast-plate, spear, and
cross-bow,--trophies of war and the chase furnished decorations suited
to the taste of the occupants, and the hides of slaughtered beasts
carpeted the cold floor. Stirring tales of love and warfare gathered little
knots of listeners; wandering minstrels sought hospitality, and repaid it

in songs and rhymes; the beef and the bowl went round; my lord's jester
made his privileged way into every circle in turn, and cracked his jokes
at everybody's expense; and pretty Bess, my lady's maid, peeped in at
the open door, just in time to join in the laugh against her lover.
But Fancy only whispered, and another little attendant, whose name
was Fact, spoke out, and interrupted her.
"Would you like to see the family-plate?" asked our guide, with the air
of one who felt she had really nothing worth showing, but was bound to
fulfil her task; and, entering one of the stone-walled apartments, she
pointed out a few enormous pewter platters, much dimmed by time and
neglect, leaning against the wall.
What visions of Christmas feasts and wassails these relics might have
awakened in me, had I been left to gaze on them undisturbed, it is
impossible to say; but my mind was not permitted to follow its own
bent.
"There's nicer ones down at the house, all brightened up," said the child,
with simplicity, and looking disdain at the heirlooms she was
displaying.
The estimate put by the little girl upon the comparative value of old
pewter dishes was suggestive. Whether the farm-house had robbed the
castle, or the castle the farm-house, became at once an open question,
and romance died in doubt.
There could be no doubt, however, as to the genuineness of the rude old
dining-hall to which we were conducted next. The clumsy oaken table
still occupied the raised end of the apartment, where the baron feasted
his principal guests. The carved and panelled gallery whence his
minstrels cheered the banquet still stood firm on its massive pillars, and
the great stags'-antlers which surmounted it told of his skill as a
sportsman. What giant logs might once have burned in the wide
fireplaces, what sounds of revelry have gone up to the bare rafters! Our
guide's tongue went glibly as she pointed out these familiar objects, and
in the kitchen, buttery, and wine-vault, which were situated

conveniently near to the dining-hall, she seemed equally at home. It
was easy to recognize in the great stone chimneys, with their heavy
hooks and cross-bars, symptoms of banquets for which bullocks were
roasted whole and sheep and calves slain by the dozen; but we needed
her practised lips to suggest the uses of the huge stone chopping-blocks,
the deeply sunk troughs, the narrow gutters that crossed the stone
pavement, all illustrative of the primitive days when butcher and cook
wrought simultaneously, and this contracted cellar served at once for
slaughter-house and kitchen. Her little airy figure was in strange
contrast with these gloomy passages, these stones that had reeked with
blood and smoke. She glided before us into the mysterious depths of
the storehouse and ale-vault, as the new moon glides among damp,
black clouds; as she directed our attention to the oaken cupboards for
bread and cheese, the stone benches that once supported long rows of
casks, the little wicket in the doorway, through which the butler doled
out provisions to a waiting crowd of poor, she might well have been
likened to a freshly trimmed lamp, lighting up the dark, mysterious
past.
Freshly trimmed she unquestionably was, and by careful hands, but not
a voluntary light; for, the moment her explanations were finished, or
our curiosity satisfied, she sank into an indifference of speech and
attitude which proved her distaste to a place and a task utterly foreign
to her nature. Evidently, the hall which we had come so far to see, and
were so eager to explore, was at once the most familiar object of her
life and her most utter aversion. She had been drilled into a mechanical
knowledge of its history, but the place itself was to her what an old
grammar or spelling-book is to the unwilling pupil,--a thing to