lifted the curtain and watched the enemy to his death; there in the dark, narrow passage--too narrow even to allow of his drawing sword--Guise found himself caught like a rat in a trap; here, in the king’s own chamber, he doubled back for safety, and met his death at the foot of the royal bed. It is all very thrilling and very real; and little as there is to love in Henri de Guise, one cannot but pity the man for the manner of his death; and there seems nothing but justice in the murder of the king himself a short time afterwards. This second tragedy took place outside the old dungeon, a gloomy round tower with cross-barred windows and a heavy iron door, behind which the Cardinal de Guise, brother of the Balafré, suffered imprisonment at the hands of his jealous cousin. In the centre of the dungeon floor is a trap door, which, considering the general atmosphere of the place, one naturally associates with an oubliette, but which more probably represented the head of a well, run up through the building in order that the inhabitants of the castle should not suffer from want of water in siege time. It is curious to note that the historical description to which the visitor listens to-day as he follows his guide through those empty chambers at Blois is almost exactly the same as that given a hundred and twenty years ago. Arthur Young, travelling in France in 1787, paid a visit to Blois, and gives the following account of the Château and its history: “We viewed the castle for the historical monument it affords that has rendered it so famous. They show the room where the council assembled, and the chimney in it before which the Duke of Guise was standing when the king’s page came to demand his presence in the royal closet; the door he was entering when stabbed; the tapestry he was in the act of turning aside; the tower where his brother the cardinal suffered, with a hole in the floor into the dungeon of Louis XI., of which the guide tells many horrible stories, in the same tone, from having told them so often, in which the fellow in Westminster Abbey gives his monotonous history of the tombs.” Chapter Eleven CHARTRES