The mighty walls of the old Castle compass us about as they did the various dwellers within their shelter eight hundred years ago. On one side they vary from twelve feet to thirty in height, but on the outer side they rise from the moat and loom from forty to fifty feet above the lowest of the terraces. At one part, where a Saxon earthwork makes a long curved hillock at the farther end of the grounds, the wall is only ten feet above the grassy walk, but forty feet down on the other side. The Norman Conqueror simply built his wall resting against the mound of the original and more elementary fortification. Here the line of the screen breaks off abruptly; but we can see that at one time it was carried on to an artificial hill on the summit of which the curious feature of a second keep was built—the well-preserved main keep forms an imposing incident of the landscape in the opposite direction.
The small plateau which was once enclosed by the screen-wall is not more than three acres in extent; from its elevation of a couple of hundred feet it overlooks the level country and the shallow river-way for many miles—a tranquil landscape of sylvan beauty dominated by the everlasting Downs. Almost to the very brink of the lofty banks of the plateau on one side we have an irregular bowling-green, bordered by a row of pollard ashes. From a clause in one of my title deeds I find that three hundred years ago the bowling-green was in active existence and played a useful part as a landmark in the delimitation of the frontier. It is brightly green at all seasons; and the kindly neighbouring antiquarian confided in me how its beauty was attained and is maintained.
“Some time ago an American tourist asked the man who was mowing it how it came to be such a fine green, and says the man, 'Why, it's as easy as snuffling: all you've got to do is to lay it down with good turf at first and keep on cutting it for three or four hundred years and the thing is done.' Smart of the fellow, wasn't it?”
“It was very smart,” I admitted.
Our neighbour showed his antiquarian research in another story as well as in this one. It related to the curate of a local parish who, in the unavoidable absence of his vicar, who was a Rural Dean, found himself taking a timid breakfast with the Bishop of the Diocese. He was naturally a shy man and he was shying very highly over an egg that he had taken and that was making a very hearty appeal to him. Observing him, the Bishop, with a thorough knowledge of his Diocese, and being well aware that the electoral contest which had been expected a few months earlier had not taken place, turned to the curate and remarked——
But if you've heard the story before what he remarked will not appeal to you so strongly as the egg did to the clergyman; so there is nothing gained by repeating the remark or the response intoned by the curate.
But when our antiquarian told us both we heartily agreed with him that that curate deserved to be a bishop.
We are awaiting without impatience. I trust, the third of this Troika team of anecdotes—the one that refers to the Scotsman and Irishman who came to the signpost that told all who couldn't read to inquire at the blacksmith's. That story is certain to be revealed to us in time. The antiquarian from the stable of whose memory the other two of the team were let loose cannot possibly restrain the third.