Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/100

96 George Vernon, the King of the Peak, and his two lovely daughters, Margaret and Dora. Those were days, Dame—those were days!' And as he ceased he looked up to the tower with an eye of sorrow, and shook and smoothed down his white hairs.

I tell thee,' replied the ancient portress, sorely moved in mind between present duty and service to the noble owner of Haddon and her lingering affection for the good old times of which memory shapes so many paradises: 'I tell thee the tower looks as high and as lordly as ever; and there is something about its silent porch and its crumbling turrets which gives it a deeper hold of our affections than if an hundred knights even now came prancing forth at its porch, with trumpets blowing and banners displayed.'

Ah, Dame Foljambe!' said the husbandman; 'yon deer now bounding so blithely down the old chase, with his horny head held high, and an eye that seems to make nought of mountain and vale, it is a fair creature. Look at him! See how he cools his feet in the Wye, surveys his shadow in the stream, and now he contemplates his native hills again. So! away he goes, and we gaze after him, and admire his speed and his beauty. But were the hounds at his flanks, and the bullets in his side, and the swords of the hunters bared for the brittling—ah, Dame! we should change our cheer; we should think that such shapely limbs and such stately antlers might have reigned in wood and on hill for many summers. Even so we think of that stately old Hall, and lament its destruction.'

Dame Foljambe thinks not so deeply on the matter,' said a rustic;' she thinks, the less the Hall fire, the less is the chance of the Hall being consumed; the less the company, the longer will the old Hall floor last, which she sweeps so clean, telling so many stories of the tree that made it; that the seven Virtues in tapestry would do well in avoiding wild company; and that the lass with the long shanks, Diana, and her nymphs, will hunt more to her fancy on her dusty acre of old arras than in the dubious society of the lords and the heroes of the Court Gazette. Moreover, the key at her girdle is the commission by which she is keeper of this cast-off and moth-eaten garment of the noble name of Manners; and think ye that she holds that power lightly which makes her governess of ten thousand bats and owls, and gives her the awful responsibility of an armoury