"Here I am, my dear friend, at my own house, my roofless home; and my first scrawl from here is to the vicarage. You will be sorry to hear that the Lords of Her Majesty's Council have defied all equitable terms in my eleven years' suffering case. My counsel and myself have only received impertinent replies from under officials. Had my lords met my case like gentlemen and statesmen, I should not have been driven to the course I intend to pursue. "I left the Terrace very early this morning, and at half-past seven o'clock I arrived at the carriage-road of Dilstone Castle. I stood, and before me lay stretched the ruins of my grandfather's baronial castle; my heart beat more quickly as I approached. I am attended by my two faithful retainers, Michael and Andrew. Mr. Samuel Aiston conveyed a few needful things; the gentle and docile pony trotted on until I reached the level top of the carriage-road, and then we stopped. I dismounted and opened the gate and bid my squires to follow, and, in front of the old flag tower, I cut with a spade three square feet of green sod into a barrier for my feet, in the once happy nursery--the mother's joyful upstairs parlour--the only room now standing, and quite roofless. I found not a voice to cheer me, nothing but naked plasterless walls; a hearth with no frame of iron; the little chapel which contains the sacred tombs of the silent dead, and the dishonoured ashes of my grandsires. "All here is in a death-like repose, no living thing save a few innocent pigeons, half wild; but there has been a tremendous confusion, a wild and wilful uproar of rending, and a crash of headlong havoc, every angle is surrounded with desolation, and the whole is a monument of state vengeance and destruction. But here is the land--the home of my fathers--which I have been robbed of; this is a piece of the castle, and the room in which they lived, and talked, and walked, and smiled, and were cradled and watched with tender affection. You never saw this old tower nearer than from the road; the walls of it are three feet or more in some parts thick, and of rough stone inside. The floor of this room where I am writing this scrawl is verdure, and damp with the moisture from heaven. It has not even beams left for a ceiling, and the stairs up to it are scarcely passible; but I am truly thankful that all the little articles I brought are now up in this room, and no accident to my men.