“Sir knight, Sir knight, if your heart be right,
  And your nerves be firm and true,”

(fancy “nerves” in a ballad!)—­

  “Sir knight, Sir knight, a beauty bright
  In durance waits for you.”

The ballad, written by M.G.  Lewis, now describes in a painfully commonplace manner the knight’s further adventures.  He and his guide wandered round and round and high and low in the maze of chambers within the castle, until at last a door of brass, whose bolt was a venomous snake, gave them entrance to a gloomy hall, draped in black, which the “hundred lights” failed to brighten.  In the hall a hundred knights of “marble white” lay sleeping by their steeds of “marble black as the raven’s back.”  At the end of the hall, guarded by two huge skeleton forms, the imprisoned lady was seen in tears within a crystal tomb.  One skeleton held in his bony fingers a horn, the other a “falchion bright,” and the knight was told to choose between them, and the fate of himself and the lady would depend upon his choice.  Sir Guy, after long hesitation, blew a shrill blast upon the horn; at the sound the hundred steeds stamped their hoofs, the hundred knights sprang up, and the unlucky knight fell down senseless, with his ghastly guide’s words ringing in his ears—­

  “Shame on the coward who sounded a horn
  When he might have unsheathed a sword!”

In the morning, the unfortunate Sir Guy awoke to find himself lying amongst the ruins, and forthwith began his ceaseless and unavailing search for the lady he had failed to rescue.

The legend similar to this in many respects is that of King Arthur and his court at Sewingshields, to which allusion has already been made in the chapter on the Roman Wall.  I cannot do better than give this in the words of Mr. Hodgson, who tells the story in his History of Northumberland.  “Immemorial tradition has asserted that King Arthur, his queen Guenever, his court of lords and ladies, and his hounds were enchanted in some cave of the crags, or in a hall below the castle of Sewingshields, and would continue entranced there until someone should first blow a bugle-horn that lay on a table near the entrance of the hall, and then with the ‘sword of the stone’ (was this Excalibur?) cut a garter, also placed there beside it.  But none had ever heard where the entrance to this enchanted hall was, till the farmer at Sewingshields, about fifty years since, was sitting knitting on the ruins of the castle, and his clew fell, and ran downwards through a rush of briars and nettles, as he supposed, into a subterraneous passage.  Full in the faith that the entrance to King Arthur’s hall had now been discovered, he cleared the briary portal of its weeds and rubbish, and entering a vaulted passage, followed in his darkling way the thread of his clew.  The floor was infested with toads and lizards; and the dark wings of bats, disturbed by his unhallowed intrusion, flitted fearfully