"Hah!" says the Major warming. "Many
Madam, many."

"And I should say you have been familiar
with them all?"

"As a rule (with its exceptions like all rules)
my dear Madam" says the Major, " they have
honoured me with their acquaintance, and not
infrequently with their confidence."

Watching the Major as he drooped his white
head and stroked his black moustachios and
moped again, a thought which I think must have
been going about looking for an owner
somewhere dropped into my old noddle if you will
excuse the expression.

"The walls of my Lodgings" I says in a
casual way—for my dear it is of no use going
straight at a man who mopes—" might have
something to tell, if they could tell it."

The Major neither moved nor said anything
but I saw he was attending with his shoulders
my dear—attending with his shoulders to what
I said. In fact I saw that his shoulders were
struck by it.

"The dear boy was always fond of story-
books" I went on, like as if I was talking to
myself. " I am sure this house—his own home
—might write a story or two for his reading
one day or another."

The Major's shoulders gave a dip and a curve
and his head came up in his shirt-collar. The
Major's head came up in his shirt-collar as I
hadn't seen it come up since Jemmy went to
school.

"It is unquestionable that in intervals of
cribbage and a friendly rubber, my dear Madam,"
says the Major, "and also over what used to be
called in my young times—in the salad days of
Jemmy Jackman—the social glass, I have
exchanged many a reminiscence with your
Lodgers."

My remark was—I confess I made it with the
deepest and artfullest of intentions—"I wish
our dear boy had heard them!"

"Are you serious Madam?" asks the Major
starting and turning full round.

"Why not Major?"

"Madam" says the Major, turning up one of
his cuffs, "they shall be written for him."

"Ah! Now you speak" I says giving my
hands a pleased clap. "Now you are in a way
out of moping Major!"

"Between this and my holidays—I mean the
dear boy's" says the Major turning up his other
cuff, " a good deal may be done towards it."

"Major you are a clever man and you have
seen much and not a doubt of it."

"I'll begin," says the Major looking as tall
as ever he did, " to-morrow."

My dear the Major was another man in three
days and he was himself again in a week and he
wrote and wrote and wrote with his pen scratching
like rats behind the wainscot, and whether
he had many grounds to go upon or whether he
did at all romance I cannot tell you, but what
he has written is in the left-hand glass closet of
the little bookcase close behind you, and if
you'll put your hand in you'll find it come out
heavy in lumps sewn together and being
beautifully plain and unknown Greek and Hebrew
to myself and me quite wakeful, I shall take
it as a favour if you'll read out loud and read
on.

II.

HOW THE FIRST FLOOR WENT TO CROWLEY
CASTLE.

I have come back to London, Major,
possessed by a family-story that I have picked up
in the country. While I was out of town, I
visited the ruins of the great old Norman castle
of Sir Mark Crowley, the last baronet of his
name, who has been dead nearly a hundred
years. I stayed in the village near the castle,
and thence I bring back some of the particulars
of the tale I am going to tell you, derived from
old inhabitants who heard them from their
fathers;—no longer ago.

We drove from our little sea-bathing place,
in Sussex, to see the massive ruins of Crowley
Castle, which is the show-excursion of Merton.
We had to alight at a field gate: the road further
on being too bad for the slightly-built carriage,
or the poor tired Merton horse: and we walked
for about a quarter of a mile through uneven
ground, which had once been an Italian garden;
and then we came to a bridge over a dry moat,
and went over the groove of a portcullis that
had once closed the massive entrance, into an
empty space surrounded by thick walls,
draperied with ivy, unroofed, and open to the sky.
We could judge of the beautiful tracery that
had been in the windows, by the remains of the
stonework here and there; and an old man
—" ever so old," he called himself when we
inquired his exact age—who scrambled and
stumbled out of some lair in the least devastated
part of the ruins at our approach, and who
established himself as our guide, showed us a
scrap of glass yet lingering in what was the
window of the great drawing-room not above
seventy years ago. After he had done his duty,
he hobbled with us to the neighbouring church,
where the knightly Crowleys lie buried: some
commemorated by ancient brasses, some by altar-
tombs, some by fine Latin epitaphs, bestowing
upon them every virtue under the sun. He had
to take the church-key back to the adjoining
parsonage at the entrance of the long straggling
street winch forms the village of Crowley. The
castle and the church were on the summit of a
hill, from which we could see the distant line of
sea beyond the misty marshes. The village fell
away from the church and parsonage, down the
hill. The aspect of the place was little, if at
all, changed, from its aspect in the year 1772.

But I must begin a little earlier. From one
of the Latin epitaphs I learnt that Amelia
Lady Crowley died in 1756, deeply regretted by
her loving husband, Sir Mark. He never married
again, though his wife had left him no heir to
his name or his estate—only a little tiny girl—
Theresa Crowley. This child would inherit her
mother's fortune, and all that Sir Mark was free
to leave; but this little was not much; the castle