"Oh, Deschamp," exclaimed one of the party to a friend at his side, who was plucking the long gray moss of a peculiar species, which literally clothes the castle walls inside and out, "look yonder at Minerva's bird." "Ha! ha!" chorused the company--"a veritable owl!" Thereupon one and all began picking up bits of brick and mortar from where they stood, and threw them at the bird with various degrees of skill. One or two bits even struck it, but so far from being roused thereby, the owl merely gave one boding, long-drawn, sepulchral screech, and, contracting its ghastly outline into still smaller compass, fairly buried its broad visage between the meeting bony tips of its wings. "What a stupid creature! hoo! horoo!" shouted they, thinking by that means to induce it to fly. But the outcry only terrified the bird to such a degree, that it stuck its claws convulsively into the decayed timber, and stirred not at all. "It's the way o' them creeturs," here said the guide, who was showing the party over the castle; "they're about the stupidest things in creation, I'm a thinking!" "Humph!" muttered Lord Swindon, a handsome, athletic young man of twenty, "with such an example before our eyes, we can not but admit your opinion to be highly philosophic and indisputable. But I say, old fellow," added he, tapping the guide familiarly on the shoulder with the light riding switch he carried in his hand, "is _that_ beam a rotten one?" "_I_ shouldn't be over-for'ard to trust myself on it, sir," replied the man--a fat dumpy personage. "_You_ wouldn't! No. I should rather think not," responded Lord Swindon, a smile of supreme disdain sweeping across his features, as he surveyed the "old fellow" from head to foot. "But, tell me, did you ever know _any body_ walk upon it, eh?" "Oh, dear, yes. Only last summer, a young Oxonian ran from end to end of it, as I seed with my own eyes." "Did he?" "True," put in Deschamp. "I remember now, it was young Manners of Brazennose; and didn't he brag about it!" "Him!" exclaimed Lord Swindon, with a toss of the head; "that fellow, poor milksop? Not," continued he, hastily, "that it is any thing of a feat. Pooh!" "Not a feat!" murmured his companions; and, with one accord, they stretched forth their necks, and, gazing down the dim abyss, shuddered at what they beheld. Well they might. The beam in question rose at a height of about one hundred feet, and naught beneath it was there but a gloomy chasm, only broken in one or two places by crumbling beams, and not one even of these was by many feet near it. "Oh, Swindon, how can you say so?" "I can say it, and I do," snappishly replied the fiery young man, his brain heated with wine; "and, at any rate, what that fellow Manners has done, I can do. So look out!"