What an endless succession of towers and turrets (some of them with distinctive names, Hotspur and Bloody Gap) archways and corridors, walls and embrasures, and all the grim massive paraphernalia of the past, apparently as doggedly determined as ever. Perhaps, as one writer puts it, only a Percy could live quite at his ease as master of Alnwick Castle. One cannot imagine the average man making himself congenially at home here. But the inside comforts are an overflowing compensation for a somewhat forbidding exterior. We are told that even the towers at the angles of the encircling walls are museums of British and Egyptian antiquities, and game trophies, collected by members of the family. The fourth Duke has left much to show for the quarter of a million he lavished upon the building--exquisite wood carving, frescoes, marbles, and canvases. Mantovani, who restored the Raphael frescoes in the Vatican, was not too great a man to be hired by a Percy to adorn his Border castle. The walls of the grand staircase are panelled with beautiful marbles. There are unique paintings: the dining-room, a noble apartment, is pompous with Percys in fine frames, bewigged, robed and plain; the first Duke and his wife, who helped him to a dignity neither his money nor his courtly manners could have won for him, hang suitably in the place of honour above the hearth. Vandyck, Moroni, and Andrea del Sarto are worthily represented in the castle. Giorgione, who did so well the comparatively little he had time for, is here in his "Lady with the Lute." Raphael, Guido, and Titian are also within these swarthy outer walls, Titian's landscape contribution being specially notable, like Giovanni Bellini's "The Gods enjoying the Fruits of the Earth." One looks from it to the fair Northumberland country beyond the windows and then at the splendour and taste of the castle, and fancies, inevitably, that the Percys themselves have in these later days obtained quite their share of the privileges of Bellini's gods. Nothing that makes for domestic pleasure is lacking at Alnwick Castle. There is a stately library of some 15,000 books, with chairs for dreaming and chairs for study; and, not to slight meaner comforts, there is a kitchen that is a model of its baronial kind, about fifty yards distant from the dining-hall, with which it communicates by an underground passage. The first English possession acquired by the house of Percy north of the Tees was Dalton, afterwards called Dalton-Percy. Then came Alnwick, originally owned by the De Vescis, and purchased from them about 1309; Warkworth; Prudhoe-on-Tyne, one of the most picturesque of Northumbrian fortresses; Cockermouth; and Keeldar, in the Cheviots. And what of the Percys who ruled, and still rule, at Alnwick in their day of might? Very ancient is the name, numbering among its early patriarchs such grand old heroes as Manfred the Dane, and