We left it and walked up the street to find the castle. I think I forgot to say at the proper place that the whole town of Winchester that day was in a state of breathless excitement about a cricket match. The boys of Winchester College were playing against the boys from Eton, and pretty nearly everybody in town had gone to see the game. When we got to the castle, the man who ought to have been there to show it to us had gone to see the cricket match, like the rest. But his wife, who was a very pleasant elderly lady, said that she would show it to us.
They hold court in the castle still. Not the sort of court that King Arthur used to hold, but courts of justice for the County of Hants. The old woman took us into one room after another and told us about the trials that had taken place in them. We pretended to be greatly interested, but we were not a bit. But by and by she took us to a place where we were interested. It was the great hall of the castle. I should feel sorry for anybody who was not interested in the great hall of Winchester Castle. It belonged to the old castle that William the Conqueror built, where more kings and queens lived or were born or died or did other fascinating things than I should dare to try to remember. And this was the hall of Parliament for almost four hundred years. "And we may as well believe," I said, "that now we are standing in King Arthur's hall. If Winchester was Camelot there is no reason to suppose that his castle was not on this very spot, and there is no reason to suppose, either, that the great hall was not on this very spot. Henry VII. believed it, when his son was born here and he named him Arthur."
It is a beautiful room as it stands to-day. It is long and wide and high. It has fine arches and cluster columns and windows of stained glass. But what we gazed at most hung high up on the wall at the west end of the hall. The old woman told us that it was King Arthur's Round Table. Well, there was no doubt that it was round, and she said that there was no doubt that it had been a table once, because there were places at the back of it to fasten legs. We found a picture of the back of it afterwards in a book about Winchester, and it showed that she was right. The table is eighteen feet across, if you insist on my being exact. The table is painted in quite an elaborate style. There is a big rose in the middle of it, and then there is a border, and in the border are the words: "This is the round table of King Arthur and his twenty-four Knights." This did not make us believe in the table any the more, because we knew very well that twenty-four knights would not make any show at all in King Arthur's hall. Above the rose, as the table hangs now, and with his feet resting on it, is a picture of King Arthur himself. The rest of the table, except the outer edge, is painted with broad stripes of dark and light, which run from the border around the rose to the larger border of the whole table. The old woman asked us to notice that the names of the knights were around the edge of the table.
We tried to make out the names and we did make out some of them. There were Lancelot and Lionel and Tristram and Gareth and Bedivere and Palamides and Bors and Kay and Mordred and others that we could not read. The old woman said that there were some of them that nobody had ever been able to read, and we were not so proud as to try to read what we were told that nobody could. It was King Henry VIII. who had this table painted in such a gorgeous way, and it seemed to us that the picture of King Arthur did not look quite unlike Henry. No, we could not quite believe in the table after all. King Arthur's Round Table had places, as we knew, for a hundred and fifty knights, and this had places for only twenty-four. Still we could not help being uncommonly interested in anything that had even been called King Arthur's Round Table for four hundred years at the very least, and probably for six hundred.
"You see," said the old woman, "the three pictures on the windows over the Round Table are King Arthur and King Alfred and King Canute, a Briton and a Saxon and a Dane."
We looked up at the three kings on the stained glass windows, and it was then that I made a dreadful mistake. It came into my mind that it would be a good plan to show off to this good lady who had so kindly shown us the hall, how much we knew about these three kings. Pride does sometimes go before a fall. "Helen," I said, "tell this lady something about King Arthur, just to show her how much we have learned."
"I don't want to tell about him," Helen answered, "I would rather you would tell a story about him."
"But I am not going to tell any story now," I said, "I want you to tell one—any one you like, just to show that you can do it."
"But I don't want to show that I can do it."
"Helen, if you do not tell us something about King Arthur at once, I will not tell you another story for a week."