Leading out from this room is a door that you might suppose would
conduct you into a closet--but no; it opens on a flight of steps,
down which you descend a little, and then find yourself at the edge
of an opening that looks like a well. This was part of the ancient
manor-house, or castle, which was destroyed in one of the Border feuds,
when the Welch and English, in the time of Owen Glyndwr, used to give
each other rather warm reception. It then formed the dungeon or prison,
which each chieftain of the march country had within his residence,
and where he could detain refractory tenants or unpleasant neighbours.
The worthy squire has now turned it into his Madeira cellar, and keeps
in it a hogshead of the most particular East India that ever left the
island and crossed the Line. He has it under his own special lock and
key; tastes it only now and then, and threatens to keep it in the cask
till his son comes of age.
The real cellars themselves are goodly things to see; none of your
cramped up wee bits of things that they build now-a-days, but where,
besides the usual stock of beer and strong ale, for the general run
of the house and neighbourhood, there is left room enough for stowing
away a hogshead brewed on the birth of each child of the family, and
destined to remain there till they each attain their one-and-twentieth
year. They are fourteen in number, and bear the names of those in whose
honour they were filled; there, then, is Master Thomas and Miss Lucy,
and Miss Susan and Master William; and so on, through the whole of
the rising generation. As for the wine-cellar, 'tis an unfathomable
recess; there is port and claret in it enough for the whole county;
and the fountain in the court might be made to run sherry for a week
before the stock would be exhausted. A pile of champagne-cases stands
at one end, and some dozen bins of the extra particulars are built up
by themselves. It would do good to the heart of any man to wander about
these cellars for a morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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