hundred years ago.  It was all in its glory about the time when Thomas-a-Becket, the Magnificent, used to entertain great companies of belted knights of the realm in a manner that exceeded regal munificence in those days—­even directing fresh straw to be laid for them on his ample mansion floor, that they might not soil the bravery of their dresses when they bunked down for the night.  The building is brimful of the character and history of that period.  Indeed, there are no two milestones of English history so near together, and yet measuring such a space of the nation’s life and mariners between them, as this hall and that of Chatsworth.

It was built, of course, in the bow and arrow times, when the sun had to use the same missiles in shooting its barbed rays into the narrow apertures of old castles—­or the stone coffins of fear-hunted knights and ladies, as they might be called.  What a monument this to the dispositions and habits of the world, outside and inside of that early time!  Here is the porter’s or warder’s lodge just inside the huge gate.  To think of a living being with a human soul in him burrowing in such a place!—­a big, black sarcophagus without a lid to it, set deep in the solid wall.  Then there is the chapel.  Compare it with that of Chatsworth, and you may count almost on your fingers the centuries that have intervened between them.  It was new-roofed soon after the discovery of America, and, perhaps, done up to some show of decency and comfort.  But how small and rude the pulpit and pews—­looking like rough-boarded potato-bins!  Here is the great banquet-hall, full to overflowing with the tracks and cross-tracks of that wild, strange life of old.  There is a fire-place for you, and the mark in the chimney-back of five hundred Christmas logs.  Doubtless this great stone pavement of a floor was carpeted with straw at banquets, after the illustrious Becket’s pattern.

Here is a memento of the feast hanging up at the top of the kitchenward door—­a pair of roughly-forged, rusty handcuffs amalgamated into one pair of jaws, like a muskrat trap.  What was the use of that thing, conductor?  “That sir, they put the ’ands in of them as shirked and didn’t drink up all the wine as was poured into their cups, and there they made them stand on tiptoe up against that door, sir, before all the company, sir, until they was ashamed of theirselves.”  Descend into the kitchen, all scarred with the tremendous cookery of ages.  Here they roasted bullocks whole, and just back in that dark vault with a slit or two in it for the light, they killed and drest them.  There are relics of the shambles, and here is the great form on which they cut them up into manageable pieces.  It would do you good, you Young America, to see that form, and the cross-gashes of the meat ax in it.  It is the half of a gigantic English oak, which was growing in Julius Caesar’s time, sawed through lengthwise, making a top surface several feet wide, black and smooth as ebony.  Some of