No. When the vicar was giving out his text, William Edwards was studying a 'sermon in stones,' his text being Caerphilly Castle, and he standing in blank awe and amazement beneath the barbican towers of the only drawbridge time has spared out of the original thirteen, much as he had stood in infancy overpowered by the comparative vastness of Eglwysilan's church when he was first brought face to face with it.
And now it was but a dumpy boy of nine who stood transfixed by that approach to a stronghold, 'of which the very ruins are stupendous,' a boy unread in history, who knew nothing of the Romans, or of Beli Gwar, or of Robert Fitzhamon, or of any of the conjectural first-founders, or of Edward the First who added so largely to its strength and size. He could see that it stood encircled by water in a wide plain surrounded by dark and barren mountains, but had any one informed him that it occupied an area equal to Windsor Castle he would have been no wiser, never having seen a castle before, or heard of any Windsor except the lord of the soil around his home.
With mountains he was familiar. Their grandeur did not oppress him. They were the work of the infinite God who made the whole world, who set the sun and the moon and stars high in the heavens to give us light. The creation of the universe by the Almighty hand was no new idea in the boy's mind. But that men, only men, should have put that vast pile together, its towers, its massive walls that had outlasted hundreds of years, was suggestive of possibilities and capabilities that took his breath away.
He stood there long, not so much because he was tired with his five-miles' rough walk that hot morning, but to overcome his first sensations of awe. Then he passed between the two great towers, and traversed courts and alleys, citadel, hall, chapel, whatever the pillared areas, the vast walls and arched windows, may suggest to antiquaries. To the boy they suggested only a marvellous enigma it was his fixed determination to solve some day.
In his explorations he had to scramble over the fragmentary ruins of a second drawbridge between flanking towers, over which the friendly ivy had thrown an evergreen mantle. Here he stood gazing astonished at the mass of solid masonry which had walled the castle in, and at a great arched gateway under which he passed. He groped his way down to an underground chamber where had been a smelting furnace and a mint; and from that wonder of wonders, a staircase to the turret-top.
But nothing held him so spellbound as the leaning tower, which, with chambers and passages complete, and outer walls full ten feet thick, overhung its base nearly four yards, a threatening mass that so had hung in mid air since the convulsion that had rent the tower in twain centuries before, yet held aloft as surely as the tower of Bologna or of Pisa.
Nothing knew William of these, or of battles or sieges, or of the force of water let in on molten metal; but he could wonder how the stones held together, and he could argue with himself that what had been done might be done.
Aladdin's enchanted garden of precious stones was nothing to what Caerphilly Castle was to the boy William Edwards.