broad; it rises to a height of 90 feet at the battlements and contains three stories. The usual Norman pilaster buttresses occur, those at the angles being continued upwards into three of the square turrets, while the remaining corner supports a large projecting circular turret containing the main staircase. The walls are of enormous thickness, ranging from 12 to 15 feet, and as usual the building is divided into two portions by a wall 10 feet thick, rising to the maximum height of the building. [Illustration: CHEPSTOW CASTLE, MONMOUTHSHIRE.] The floors were originally of wood, but when Sir Christopher Wren destroyed the ancient interior features of the Keep, great brick vaults were built in the lower portion. St. John's Chapel is a magnificent gem of Early Norman ecclesiastical architecture; it stands upon the second floor, and its apsidal termination projects boldly beyond the walls of the Keep. The third floor contains the state apartments with the great Council Chamber, the walls of the chapel rising through it to the roof, and containing a mural passage and a triforium. The roof is flat and was adapted during the Tudor period for mounting artillery. The position of the original entrance to the Keep is now unknown, the present one being evidently a construction of later date. No traces of the forebuilding defending it have come to light. The internal arrangements for defence against surprise are marvellously intricate, the principal apartments being approached by mural passages so narrow that only one person could pass at a time. This was, of course, eminently desirable from a military standpoint, but inconvenient and awkward when occupied by the court. _Corfe Castle._--Seated upon an isolated chalk hill in the island of Purbeck, with a natural escarpment upon three sides where two rivers bifurcate on their way to Poole Harbour, and with a gentle slope upon the fourth side, the great castle of Corfe reared its massive front through many centuries of dramatic history, marked more than once with touches of the tragic. The remains of its cyclopean walls and towers now lie in mighty masses over its slopes, and tell eloquently of a day when destruction only seemed to occupy the minds of men, and all that was great and beautiful from the foregoing ages was marked out for desolation and ruin. Perhaps no castle in England has suffered so much as that of Corfe. Its site is connected by history with the Saxon dynasty, for King Edgar is said to have founded it; and here the tragic deed was perpetrated by which it is popularly known, when his son Edward the Martyr, King of the West Saxons, was treacherously murdered by Elfrida his step-mother. Such an unholy deed was a sinister incident in the birth of a castle, and appears to have thrown a gloom over its subsequent history. Four miles to the southward rises the bold coast-line of the Dorset littoral, while northward is the great depression occupied by the waters of Poole Harbour.