I have fibbed in these days?  Could I have betrayed a comrade?  Could I have stolen eggs or callow young from the nest?  Could I have stood quietly by and seen the weak or the maimed bullied?  Nay, verily!  In these absurd days she lighted up the whole world for me.  To sit in the same room with her was like the happiness of perpetual holiday; when she asked me to run a message for her, or to do any, the slightest, service for her, I felt as if a patent of nobility were conferred on me.  I kept my passion to myself, like a cake, and nibbled it in private.  Juliet was several years my senior, and had a lover—­was, in point of fact, actually engaged; and, in looking back, I can remember I was too much in love to feel the slightest twinge of jealousy.  I remember also seeing Romeo for the first time, and thinking him a greater man than Caesar or Napoleon.  The worth I credited him with, the cleverness, the goodness, the everything!  He awed me by his manner and bearing.  He accepted that girl’s love coolly and as a matter of course:  it put him no more about than a crown and sceptre puts about a king.  What I would have given my life to possess—­being only fourteen, it was not much to part with after all—­he wore lightly, as he wore his gloves or his cane.  It did not seem a bit too good for him.  His self-possession appalled me.  If I had seen him take the sun out of the sky, and put it into his breeches’ pocket, I don’t think I should have been in the least degree surprised.  Well, years after, when I had discarded my passion with my jacket, I have assisted this middle-aged Romeo home from a roystering wine-party, and heard him hiccup out his marital annoyances, with the strangest remembrances of old times, and the strangest deductions therefrom.  Did that man with the idiotic laugh and the blurred utterance ever love?  Was he ever capable of loving?  I protest I have my doubts.  But where are my young people?  Gone!  So it is always.  We begin to moralise and look wise, and Beauty, who is something of a coquette, and of an exacting turn of mind, and likes attentions, gets disgusted with our wisdom or our stupidity, and goes off in a huff.  Let the baggage go!

The ruined chapel adjoins the ruined castle on which I am now sitting, and is evidently a building of much older date.  It is a mere shell now.  It is quite roofless, ivy covers it in part; the stone tracery of the great western window is yet intact, but the coloured glass is gone with the splendid vestments of the abbot, the fuming incense, the chanting choirs, and the patient, sad-eyed monks, who muttered Aves, shrived guilt, and illuminated missals.  Time was when this place breathed actual benedictions, and was a home of active peace.  At present it is visited only by the stranger, and delights but the antiquary.  The village people have so little respect for it, that they do not even consider it haunted.  There are several tombs in the interior