It was a daily delight to me when I lived in Kensington to believe that Addison must have walked through my garden when he had that cottage on the secluded Fulham Road, far away from the distracting noise and bustle of the town, and went to pay a visit to his wife at Holland Park. Some of the trees of that garden must have been planted even before Addison's day. There was a mighty mulberry-tree--a straggler from Melbury (once Mulbery) Road--and this was probably one of the thousands planted by King James when he became possessed of that admirable idea of silk culture in England. Now, strange to say, I could picture to myself much more vividly the presence of Addison in that garden than I can the bustle of the old Castle's people within the walls which dominate my present ground. These people occupied the Castle from century to century. When they first entered into possession they wore the costume of the Conquest, and no doubt they honoured the decrees of fashion as they changed from year to year; but they faded away without leaving a record of any personality to absorb the attention of the centuries, and without such an individuality I find it impossible to realise the scene, except for an occasional hour when the moonlight bathes the tower of the ruined keep, and I fancy that I hear the iron tread of the warder going his rounds--I cannot plunge myself into the spacious days of plate armour. It is the one Great Man or the one Great Woman that enables us nowadays to realise his or her period, and our Castle has unhappily no ghost with a name, and one ghost with a name is more than an armed host of nonentities. There is a tradition--there is just a scrap of evidence to support it--that Dr. Samuel Johnson once visited a house in the High Street and ate cherries in the garden. Every time I have visited that house I have seen the lumbering Hogarthian hero intent upon his feast, and every time that I am in that garden I hear the sound of his “Why, sir----” I complained bitterly to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was with us in the tilt-yard garden, that we had not even the shadow of a ghost--ghosts by the hundred, no doubt, but no real ghost of some one that did things. “You will have to create one for yourself,” he said. “One must have bones and flesh and blood--plenty of blood, before one can create a ghost, as you well know,” said I. “I have searched every available spot for a name associated with the place, but I have found nothing.” “Don't be in a hurry; he'll turn up some day when you're not expecting him,” said my friend. [Illustration: 0208] But I am still awaiting an entity connected with the Castle, and I swear, as did the young Lord Hamlet:-- “By Heaven! I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.” CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH