children who had wandered away from the town to poke among the holes for crabs. Beyond these, nothing broke the monotony of the expanse save the white, dusty, lonely high-road that came from Coxmouth and went by Scaggleton to Coxmolton. By-not through; for the queen's highway despised Scaggleton and its fish-scales, and disdaining to cross the antique drawbridge, which was the sole gate to the town, turned off to the right upon the southern side of the Scaggle.

Scaggleton owned just three streets, radiating all of them from a common centre-the marketplace. One led to the drawbridge; a second, degenerating into a lane, joined by-and-by the high-road farther up the stream; and the third was the approach to Scaggleton Crags and Castle.

To hear it mentioned simply-Scaggleton Castle-sounds rather big. But although it was the seat of Christopher Norreys, Esquire, it was only a “bogus” castle after all. This Mr. Norreys who owned it, had built it thinking to cheat himself and all the world into believing that he had inherited it from his ancestors.

Mr. Norreys was a cadet of a noble family; a man who had married early in life a woman as poor as himself. Children had come tumbling into the world with such indecent haste, that food became scarce in the Norreys' household. Relatives, in high place, after much importuning, lent a helping hand, and tried to do something for their poor cousin. He was appointed first Her Majesty's Consul at the Azimbogee River; then Receiver-general at Honduras; later he became a magistrate on the frontier of Caffraria; and then Secretary to the Colonial Government of a West India island. He drifted from one place to another, finding something unsuitable in each, and at last, like a species of social flotsam and jetsam, whom no one cared to own, he found himself stranded in England. Just then his wife inherited a few thousand pounds, and died almost immediately-probably of the good news. The grief of this bereavement nearly broke Mr. Norreys down. He sought high and low for a place to dwell in, and by chance he stumbled upon Scaggleton. It was so desolate and retired, that it seemed of all places the one to suit him. Hither he brought his

little ones, and built them a home. If anything had been needed to prove him of unsound mind, this house of his would have supplied the missing link. It was in itself the strongest evidence against him.

Inspected Lying in a

At a distance, Scaggleton Castle, looked as old as the ruins of St. Bungo's Hill. closely, it was an undeniable sham. little cul-de-sac of a bay, just round the corner beyond Scaggleton, you might have thought at first sight of its turrets and battlements, its portcullis and loopholed walls, that you had come upon an old fashioned fortified stronghold of the middle ages. Yet from first to last Scaggleton Castle was a delusion and a snare; artificial and pretentious throughout; about as real as the rock-work of an open air theatre at Rosherville or Cremorne. In front of the

house ran a narrow strip of garden where nothing grew, and a few yards of drive coming up from the gate, guarded by a gingerbread portcullis. The worm-eaten gate and the rickety towers that did duty for a lodge would have sought as vainly to shut out intruders, as the rough sea-wall which fenced in the garden

succeeded in keeping the boisterous waves at bay. A mock bastion or two bulged out from this barrier-wall, and all along it were painted sham portholes, in black circles upon a line of whitewash. Such was the external aspect of Scaggleton Castle. Inside, low rooms, dark and gloomy, narrow passages, and spiral staircases, were the penalty exacted for the picturesqueness of its medieval architecture.

But those who sneered at the Castle must perforce have praised its natural surroundings. What man had built might be a hollow mockery; there was no such fault to be found with nature's handiwork round Scaggleton Castle. The rugged old cliff, beneath which the house crouched, yearning as it were for sympathy, was itself no sham; nor were the broad patches of gorse that brightened here and there the green sloping bank above; still less the rocks that lay heaped up in variegated stacks, purple, grey, blue, black, and brown, at the base of the sea wall. There was no make-believe about the rich masses of tangled sea-weed, or the glistening pools, or the grand old sea that was so changeful in all its moods. One day you might

have tickled the old villain with a straw as he lay, so smooth and peaceable and quiet; the next day he came tumbling in over the rocks, deluging the house, and wetting the very cliff behind with spray. Oh, how dreary then was that solitary house over above the beach! How the wind beat straight in upon its panes of glass and whistled through the sashes! playing now a shrill solo with long-drawn mournful notes, now gathering up all the strength of its wild orchestra-roaring waves and raindrops rattling like drum taps—and making such a clatter that it shook this pasteboard castle from roof-tree to cellar. See the waves enlisted to serve in earnest, press forward and will not be denied. They may draw back, but it is only to gain. fresh strength. Sweeping out, not discomfited, but as a ruse de guerre; re-forming in sullen steadfastness their long battle lines of billows, till, recruited and reinforced, they gather courage to charge forward again with increasing pace and louder thunder, amid the boom as of great guns, and the flashing of foam-flakes like rapid musketry, as if bent upon carrying all by

storm.