as high as the temples themselves. They
were crowded with people in every variety
of dress and colour; and certainly looked
very pretty. The Chinese have the art of
making the most of a little; and by these
grottoes, caves, and artificial mountains, they
will contrive to give you a mile and a half of
walking, where the level plain would give
you a quarter of a mile.

  A RELIC OF THE MIDDLING AGES.

IT came into our possession quite unexpectedly,
as a legacy left by an old friend of
my husband. It was described in the will
as a messuage or tenement, although it was
actually the remains of an old Norman castle.
Lawyers are precise in their language, but
certainly not descriptive; and there was no
getting any correct idea of the place without
a personal visit. The small woodcut and the
two inches of history which we found
respecting it in a book upon the Antiquities of
Sussex were sufficient to excite our curiosity;
but not sufficient to satisfy it. With as little
delay as possible, my husband went down,
and his letters were enthusiastic, not to say
rapturous. He had always a strong passion
for the middle ages (which, I must say, I
never thoroughly shared), and I was not
surprised when he suddenly returned, and gave
an order for our immediate removal. It was
rather late in a very fine autumn, and
although we had only just come back from a
lengthened stay at the seaside, we closed our
London establishment once more, as my
husband was bent upon passing the Christmas
at his new property. There was something
so novel and exciting in transplanting
ourselves direct from a rather dull modern
square, with not even a black statue of a
statesman to give it an historical flavour, to
a veritable castle in one of the oldest counties
of England, full of legends and traditions,
and venerable with age, that I was rather
pleased than otherwise with the prospect of
the change.

Our arrival produced no very great excitement
in the surrounding neighbourhood, for
the position of Rubble Castle (that was the
title it went by) was somewhat lonely. There
were several bleak hills, a scrap of moor-like
common, and a bit of ragged forest near the
place, and the village was four miles distant.
How such a baronial dwelling came into
the hands of the late owner (Mr. Vandal) we
never precisely knew, though we guessed it
was an unredeemed mortgage.

Our removal was attended with considerable
inconvenience. Our servants were annoyed
at leaving London, and more annoyed at
being conveyed to what I heard them call a
downright "penictentshary." The coachman
and footman became friendly for the first
time since they had been in our service; the
old female cook, presuming on her length of
servitude, was rebellious; the two housemaids
were sulky and obstinate; my own maid was
unusually prim and severe; and the only
one who seemed to enjoy the change was
little Waddles, our page.

Every room of our dreary castle was a
passage, and every passage was a vault. It
looked an imposing place from the outside,
with its turrets, its drawbridge, its portcullis,
its towers, its moat (which made the lower
apartments very damp), its arched doorways,
battlements, and little peep-holes of windows;
but inside there was not a room—to use a
vulgar expression—that you could swing a
cat in, if we except the two principal halls,
which were like railway tunnels. But the
most singular part about it was an old warder,
who looked aged enough to have been present
when the first stone of the castle was laid.
He was very feeble, of course, with rheumatism,
and was just one of those old servants
—very unlike my servants—whose pride it is
to die at their posts. And a nice post it was.
A hole in the thick stone wall, like a cell.
Call it a porter's lodge, or give it any fine
name you will, but you cannot alter the
place. It was an unmistakable cell, worse
than many I saw at the model prison, where
burglars and such people were humanely
confined for their crimes. The old warder's
duty was to attend to the portcullis and
drawbridge (the only entrance across the
moat), and he would allow no one to interfere
with him. He had worked that portcullis
and that drawbridge before the present
generation was born, before the family
possessors of Rubble Castle went gradually to
the bad, and sold or mortgaged their ancient
property, and he was not in the humour to
be assisted by our coachman or footman,
even if either of those lazy and dissatisfied
menials had offered their inexperienced
services. The portcullis and drawbridge were
old—absurdly old— the machinery was
antiquated, rusty, and generally out of order,
and the process, in the old warder's hands, of
letting any person in or out, was a noisy,
creaking performance that lasted nearly
half-an-hour.

There was little time left for moping about
or even thoroughly examining the place, for
some of the visitors— whom my husband had
invited, with his usual impetuosity, to give
the place a warming—were expected early in
the course of the next day. We did what
we could with mouldy hangings and scanty
furniture, made some centuries before
upholstery was raised into the dignity of an
art; and, by the aid of enormous fires roaring
up forge-like chimneys, we produced the
appearance of comfort, if not the reality.
The servants were not at all reconciled to
the place upon further acquaintance, and
they considered the whole removal as
something little better than joining a gang of
gipsies. If their situations had not been
good, and their master and mistress had not
been indulgent, I believe the whole body