we passed beyond the hill and came to a certain Junction Inn, set where two roads crossed, and here we rested on a bench before the door.

Bill and Beezer are great cronies for discussion; and on this occasion, leaving Parsifal and Galli-Curci which are their usual contention, they came to a hot dispute whether the ax or the electric chair were the softer death. Beezer leaned to the electric chair; and Bill, to urge his contrary argument for the ax, lifted up both arms and brought them down in a mighty swing to show how speedily death descends when the headsman is master of his craft.

His persuasion was too emphatic, for suddenlypat upon the stroke!-the bench collapsed and threw them to the ground. An old blind man had been sunning himself at the other end with cane against his chin, and he also went down in the crash. Bill picked him up, dusted him off and led him to the tap to drown all troubles in a mug of beer. The old fellow was goodnatured at the accident and lamented with a twinkling smile that the argument had been so rudely interrupted. It had been a pleasant break from his monotonous meditation and every few minutes, as the thought of it recurred, he fell to chuckles. "An' have ye considered hangin'?" he asked. "It's not so bad, they say as knows."

66

Though sunlight is kept forever from the blind, its glow reaches to the heart and warms their disposition. The old man told us that he had come down from the north through all the rush of London without attendant, to spend a holiday with his daughter who ran the

tavern. There had been a change of busses in the city, but a stranger had taken his elbow at the curb; for strangers were always kind. This is the reason of a blind man's sunny thought. His infirmity receives such an instant sympathy and care that he grows to think that every one is commonly as good all through the ugly day as in that one moment when he is led across to safety. In this thankful estimate of others the sunlight reaches to the blind. To know one is to know a philosopher of kindly judgment and happy thought. And one might suppose that half the sorrow of ordinary lives enters at the portal of the eyes. If shut and sealed we are a strong citadel against attack.

It was the granddaughter of our blind man who brought the mugs, and he yielded to a second filling and tapped her hand in mute affection. He confided as we left him that he had been won by Bill's argument to vote in favor of the ax.

We now pitched off the hills to the lower grassy land that lies along the Rother; and here, on an island in a lake no larger than a pond, we saw among the trees the crenelated walls of Bodiam Castle.

Any guidebook worth its salt will tell you that Bodiam Castle was built in the fourteenth century by Sir Edward Dalyngruge, a soldier of Cressy and Poictiers on his return from France; and there are marks inside of window, vault and pointed arch that corroborate the date. He employed the science of the continent, the pattern of the French, to make this a stronghold secure against attack. But it is an expert eye that can squint wisely on the texture of a wall and tell thereby

the precise turning of the centuries and the source of its builder's theft. And to one who lies on the grassy bank beyond the still waters of the lake-if any thought at all shall come to break a lazy hour-it will be the days of conquering William that present themselves.

Facts are for a narrow schoolroom, to be brushed aside upon a holiday. These battlemented towers that rise from their cool shadow in the lily pads, these walls looped for stone and arrow, seem to belong to the years when the Norman Duke first seized the land and held it roughly. Senlac to the south, where he broke the Saxon force, is here but the flight of a lazy bird; and any taller spire of Battle Abbey, if it stood on tiptoe, could see us across the hills. The shallow Rother washes the meadows to the right but, in its greater depth when the sea swept up to Rye and drowned the fields, heavy ships from France might have landed their clumsy ordnance here. In the trees there stirs the song of far-off battles, when Taillefer tossed his spear and rushed with a cry against his enemies. It is the Norman charge that sounds upon the stillness of the noon and fetches word that Harold has been slain and lies among his broken men.

Fancy constructs what world it will. It throws aside its book. And where it shall discover that walls look down on silent water to catch their beauty on the surface, it will loosely meditate how vanity survives its youth. This tower, like a gray coquette whose daring eyes are dim, still smooths its wrinkles at a glass and thinks of future conquest. The wind that rubs upon its cheek is the finger of a waiting maid in patient office of perfection.

It must be that such silly fancies moved us all, for presently Bill contrived for Bodiam a whole tissue of absurdity. It seems, for so he argued, that once in older times a lady by the name of Pomfret-Dawkenthis is pure invention-lived within these walls and did service to the Duchess as a genteel companion to amuse her evenings.

She was slipping a bit from youth, but so also was the Duchess. Pomfret, however, although her figure was overplump (the point whereof will presently appear), still retained her looks and a challenge of the eye; whereas the Duchess had so abominable a taste for purple turbans-doubtless Bill's anachronism, rising from his observation of a present fashion in every inn where ladies gathered for their tea—a taste for purple turbans, I repeat, that as time went on she cooled the ardor of his Grace. She may, also, have worn a mobcap in to breakfast and slippers that slapped against her heels; and all of us know that these defects are fatal unto love. The moon itself is not so inconstant as the husband of an unbrushed wife.

"She ate crackers in bed," said Bill, “which fretted his lordship much.'

Now it was the custom of the times-what times, God knows!-for ladies to sit of an evening at the hearth and work upon a frame a pink cupid behind a ribbon. Or they played at draughts with a flaring wick within a sconce, dealing out gossip with the moves. His Grace, meantime, being of the stuff that all men are, passed his evenings in the rough employment of