of whom has taken a wine-flask out of his pocket and has colored the clear water drawn for them out of the well in a couple of tumblers by a decent, rosy, smiling, talking old woman, who has come bustling out of the gatehouse, and who has a large, dropsical, innocent husband standing about on crutches in the sun and making no sign when you ask after his health.  This poor man has reached that ultimate depth of human simplicity at which even a chance to talk about one’s ailments is not appreciated.  But the civil old woman talks for every one, even for an artist who has come out of one of the rooms, where I see him afterward reproducing its mouldering quaintness.  The rooms are all unoccupied and in a state of extreme decay, though the castle is, as yet, far from being a ruin.  From one of the windows I see a young lady sitting under a tree across a meadow, with her knees up, dipping something into her mouth.  It is a camel’s hair paint-brush:  the young lady is sketching.  These are the only besiegers to which the place is exposed now, and they can do no great harm, as I doubt whether the young lady’s aim is very good.  We wandered about the empty interior, thinking it a pity things should be falling so to pieces.  There is a beautiful great hall—­great, that is, for a small castle (it would be extremely handsome in a modern house)—­with tall, ecclesiastical-looking windows, and a long staircase at one end climbing against the wall into a spacious bedroom.  You may still apprehend very well the main lines of that simpler life; and it must be said that, simpler though it was, it was apparently by no means destitute of many of our own conveniences.  The chamber at the top of the staircase ascending from the hall is charming still, with its irregular shape, its low-browed ceiling, its cupboards in the walls, and its deep bay window formed of a series of small lattices.  You can fancy people stepping out from it upon the platform of the staircase, whose rugged wooden logs, by way of steps, and solid, deeply-guttered hand-rail, still remain.  They looked down into the hall, where, I take it, there was always a certain congregation of retainers, much lounging and waiting and passing to and fro, with a door open into the court.  The court, as I said just now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot which you may find it at present of a summer’s day:  there were beasts tethered in it, and hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into puddles.  But my lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, could pick out the man wanted and bawl down an order, with a threat to fling something at his head if it were not instantly performed.  The sight of the groups on the floor beneath, the calling up and down, the oaken tables spread, and the brazier in the middle,—­all this seemed present again; and it was not difficult to pursue the historic vision through the rest of the building—­through the portion which connected the great hall with the tower (here the confederate