The ladies declare themselves dizzy and afraid, and we help them down the dark winding turret staircase again, and go into the enclosed parts of the ruin. Here is where the monks lived. The walls still stand, and parts of the roof. The windows are thickly ivy-hung and moss-grown. Here is the room where the monks did whilom dine. For three hundred years this dining-room was in daily use, and in the spot where erst the dining-table stood now grows a stalwart tree, whose branches tower and spread beyond the crumbling walls. Passing strange! More strange is the sight in the next room, the chapter-house, where the abbot held his gravest councils, and where the most honored of the monks were buried beneath the floor when they died. And since the roof fell in, after long battling with storms, perhaps a hundred years after the last monk was buried, one day a seed fell. A tree grew up in the room. It spread its tall branches high above the piled-up stones, and shook its brown leaves down, autumn after autumn, for years and years. It grew slowly old, and at last it died. It fell down in its death in the room where it had grown, and its once sturdy trunk struck against the old ruined walls and broke. Its roots were torn out of the ground by the fall, and stuck up their gnarled fingers in the empty room. And the grass grew over the roots, weaving a green cloak to hide their nakedness. The old trunk stretches now across the space in the room, and leans its old head against the abbey wall. I didn't read this story in a guide-book. It was told to me by the principal actor, the tree. In the abbot's kitchen we get into the huge hooded fireplace--seven of us--and there is room for more. We look up the chimney and see the glossy green ivy leaves overhead, and the blue sky shining beyond them. We toss a pebble down into the subterranean passage where, they say, the monks were wont to pass out after provisions during a time of siege; which must have been somewhat demoralizing to the besiegers, whoever they were. I stoop to pick up something in the grass of the kitchen floor, which has a glitter of gold upon it, and my face flushes with eager anticipation as I seize it. "What have you found?" asks Amy. "A relic of the monks?" asks Bunker. "It's a champagne cork," I am forced to reply. "The truth is, Netley Abbey is a show, like Niagara Falls and Bunker Hill Monument. Of course crowds of tourists come here, and of course they pop champagne and ginger beer, and cut their confounded initials in the venerable stones." "Yes," says Bunker, "I saw 'W.S.' cut in the wall at the top of the turret stairs. Saves you the trouble, you know." "I don't do that sort of thing, thank you." Nevertheless, it was curious to see some nobody's name cut at full length in the stone, with the date underneath--1770.