"'We'll take a pretty maid, We'll catch her by the hand, She shall go to Derby, For Derby be her land. She shall have a duck, my dear, She shall have a lamb, Hers shall be a nice young man, A-fighting for her sake. "'Suppose this young man was to die, And leave the lass alone, Our bells would ring, and we should sing And clap our hands together.' "And the maids said-- "'Fiddle faddle--fiddle faddle.'" "I don't like it," said Bess, impulsively. "Why should they all be jolly because the poor gentleman died?" [Sidenote: "THERE'S THINGS AS GIRLS CAN'T UNDERSTAND"] But Hals did not take that view. "There's things," he said loftily, "as girls can't understand." At this Bess turned very red, and in the spirit of the modern woman declared, "What she couldn't understand, Hals couldn't neither." And in deep dudgeon she followed Nana into the house. As the little party passed out of the garden Hals called back to me, "We've forgotten Stag a Roarning. The best of all the games we've not told you about. One that I played last year with my papa at a school feast." The twilight turned into night. The servants came out, and I was helped back to the Chapel Hall. After all it had not been a dull afternoon. One can go many miles in one's room, if one knows how to ride on the wings of fancy, and many is the garden that I had visited that day, borne along on the pinions of imagination, for were not the gardens of all time open to me? No dragons or mailed warriors guarded the entrance gates, not even a modern policeman. An hour after dinner I found myself in bed. The window of my chamber was wide open, an old lancet window of Norman days, one out of which Roger de Montgomery may have gazed, and, later, many of the Henry's of England in succession. All was very still outside. In the little bit of dark sapphire-blue sky that met my eye as I lay in bed, I saw a mist of silver stars, and the scent of the creepers entered with entrancing sweetness. I was no longer in pain, but not sleepy, so I stretched out my hand and took hold of a book. My hand closed upon a volume of Milton, well worn, and much used; for John Milton has a solemn, sacred power, and touches you with the solemnity of some grand chords heard upon a cathedral organ, and the melody of his verse is often welcome in this holy place. But it was not to his "Paradise Lost" or "Regained" that I turned, nor to his exquisite sonnets. I was in a lighter mood; I turned to the most beautiful masque that ever was written; whilst I thought of the most beautiful of all ruins, Ludlow Castle, the early home of Sir Philip Sidney, England's ideal knight, and the mirror of her chivalry.