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52 bolt still flying in response to the ponderous key, though in all probability some of them are more than a thousand years old.

In the upper rooms of the keep the visitor may also see remains of the ancient spiral stairs which led to the top, and with which there seem to have been private communications in different places. He will notice also that the immense rooms at the top have had a door between them, in the centre of the wall, which is now closed up, and that opposite to this closed up door, is a fire place, also closed up. Probably in these large rooms the Parliaments were held which have been held here; and it is not impossible to imagine that the large courts occasionally remaining here may have been feasted, and perhaps some of their numbers even bedded in these spacious chambers now, happily for the times, entirely silent, and divest of all their former martial adjustments, their strange and changing histories almost wholly conjectural. Yet we know that hearts with human passions once beat here, and that forms now dead and turned to clay once animated this forlorn silence.

There are many other traditions of the castle than these. It is said, for instance, that King Arthur and his renowned knights once drank their wassail bowl within it; and hence the story of King Arthur's cup, which tradition is doubtless truth. There are many traditions, too, of Lord William Howard, the "Belted Will" of Border story; but truth and fiction are so largely blended, that to dissever and disentangle is almost impossible. This gentleman was, it is true, the Warden of the Marches here for many years, and