which English history has something to tell us.
For, on that grassy slope, in the year 1264, the
confederated barons, under Simon de Montfort,
Earl of Leicester, gave battle to the weak King
Henry the Third, who, by his exactions and his
despotic conduct, had driven a large part of his
subjects into armed rebellion. The battle, which
was one of the most sanguinary in the middle
ages, ended in the defeat of the monarch, who,
being driven with his forces into the town, took
refuge in the Priory, to which the insurgents
endeavoured to set fire. In the town itself, the
fight was renewed with great ferocity. The
castle was furiously attacked by the barons; but
the besieged rained upon their assailants burning
missiles, supposed to have been the celebrated
Greek fire, and beat them off. Ultimately, however,
"Harry of Winchester" (who is thought
to have given his name to the mount where he
was worsted) was obliged to do as the barons
bade him; and the parliamentary system of
English government was more firmly established
in consequence. But the boon was purchased
at the cost of many thousand lives; and when
the railway workmen, in 1845, were
excavating the Priory grounds, they broke into a
charnel pit, from which they took out thirteen
waggon-loads of crushed and mangled bones.
These remains were doubtless those of men who
had perished in the great fight of 1264; and,
though nearly six hundred years had passed, the
effluvium was still so horrible, that the "navvies"
ran away from the spot in mortal loathing.

We are looking out on the sunny landscape
from the hot leads, thinking of these things, and
congratulating ourselves on the pastoral
tranquillity which has succeeded all that rage and
tumult of battle, when a sudden rush shakes the
air. Have the ghosts of the old warriors risen,
and are they charging down the declivities of
Mount Harry, as they charged in life? No;
this is a sound essentially of our own times.
The railway is close at hand, passing by means
of a tunnel under the very foundations of the
Keep. Now, we see the train plunge into its
subterranean vault; now, it is deep down beneath
the mound on which the ruins stand; now, it
emerges on the other side. The old walls
tremble with the swift and fiery strength of this
nineteenth-century wonder that shoots below
their base, and is so swiftly gone; but the Norman
architects piled their masonry as Nature
piles her rocks, and the Keep still holds its own
against all comers. And there is another modern
sound humming in our ears all this while. Away
in the town beneath, some wandering minstrel
is grinding a hand-organ; and yet, for an organ,
it may be called an antiquity. It has doubtless
done its duty in the streets of London, and is
now playing to the men of Lewes the popular
melodies of six or seven years ago.

Amongst the rubbings from old brasses in the
rooms of the tower are several containing the
knightly effigies of members of the Shelley
family, ancestors of the poet; and, coming back
again to the High-street after leaving the castle,
we see the same name over the door of a baker's
shop. Strange meeting of the chivalrous, the
poetical, and the trading, on the common
ground of one illustrious name! The stock
is as ancient in Sussex as the trees and
the hills, and the name is to be found in
other places about this very neighbourhood
of Lewes. There was a Shelley who went to
the Crusades, and who bore three golden shells
on the family coat-of-arms, where they are to be
seen to this day. Perhaps the blood of that
religious warrior runs in the veins of the peaceful
maker of daily bread for himself and others;
and assuredly, if genealogy be not a vain science,
it quivered in the heart of him who may be
called the crusader of modern free-thinking.
Old castles and new railways—crusaders and
audacious poets—here is matter enough for
thought as we wend our way towards the
station, and leave the ancient borough behind us
like a dream that is dreamt.

WHAT'S THE USE OF THAT?

LET me introduce you to Monsieur the
Chiffonnier of Paris. Let me empty into your lap
the ragman's basket. Waste not, want not. These
bits of cotton and linen rag shall be transformed
into Clorinda's scented billet-doux. When Corydon
has carried her despatch of love about for a
few weeks in his left-hand waistcoat-pocket,
crumpled it, fingered it, and at last, Phillis being
in the ascendant, tears it up and flings it out into
the mud, out of the mud its fragments shall be
rescued to appear again as part of a doll's head
or a papier-mâche work-box. Here are shreds
of cloth rag in the ragman's collection. They
will not make writing-paper, but they will help
to make flock papers for the walls of rooms, the
scarlet shreds can have their dye soaked out of
them and used again, say for the colouring of
chessmen, while as for those chessmen, they
are to be made from the kitchen bones that
have been tossed out among the waste of a
household. Or the bones may yield their oil,
or they may make glue, or they may re-appear
upon the dinner-table in the form of jelly made
of patent gelatine; or, burnt into ivory black,
they may come into the scullery as blacking, or,
perhaps, serve towards the refinement of our
best lump-sugar. Or they may be ground for
use in fertilising the soil, or they may yield
phosphorus for our lucifer-matches, or they may so
re-introduce themselves into the house that they
shall be kept daintily in crystal and silver and
shall get through the nose of Clorinda to her
shaken nerves, for their support when she first
hears the perfidy of Corydon. In the name of
rags and bones, then, let us lift our hats when we
pass by a rubbish-heap. Do we grieve when we see
rags? Why, there are not rags enough in this too
happy country. We have to import every year
three hundred thousand pounds' worth of them.

Did your cook ever throw into the dust-hole a
stale crust? Do your children scorn dry scraps
of bread? Ring the bell, have them all in, and