Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/37

34 work. One feels a little distrustful of those reforms that destroy individual happiness and snap asunder old ties.

Monday.—We drove this morning to Carisbrooke Castle, an old ruin in the heart of the island. We were shown the window through which Charles I., when imprisoned here, attempted to escape. In spite of getting my first historical impressions from Hume, that lover of kings and supreme lover of the Stuarts, I never had much sympathy with this king of bad faith; still it is not easy to stand at this window without a sorrowful sympathy with Charles. There he stood, looking on the land that seemed to him his inheritance by a Divine charter, longing for the wings of the birds that were singing round this window, to hear him to those friends who were awaiting him, and, instead of him, had only the signal which he hung out of this window to give them notice of the defeat of his project.

Nothing, I know, is more tiresome than the description of old castles which you get from such raw tourists as we are, and may find in every guidebook; hut I wish I could do up my sensations and send them to you. As we passed the Elizabethan gate, and wound away up into the old keep, stopping, now and then, to look through the openings left for the exercise of the cross-bow, or as we wandered about the walls, and stood to hear the