The kitchen was in the basement of the castle and great in size, its floor paved with slabs of stone, the walls and ceilings were paneled in oak. On one side of the room were stone-hearths with blazing fires, over which hung pots and brazen kettles. Game and meats broiled on spits, there being no cook-stoves in those days. Heavy doors, strapped with great wrought iron hinges and studded with ornamental scroll-work led into pantries and cellars. The place swarmed with liveried servants and cooks; also the king had brought his "chef de cuisine and own butler. The latter, a lordly Englishman, was a grand, haughty person who superintended the extravagant preparations for the entertainment of royalty. A maid conducted me to a corner where I was out of harm's way and regaled me with delicacies when the courses were served, oh it was fine! The chef prepared certain dishes for the king and I saw the butler taste of the viands that were placed on crown-marked dishes of porcelain and gold. He also tasted the king's wine. When at last I grew sleepy, kind maids arranged a couch of snowy linen for me, and I slept until the banquet royal was over when the guests returned to their homes. But me lord, the butler, eyed me with questioning curiosity. "Aw me lad, h'and where did your father get 'is blooming costume?" he asked. "Mother supplied it, good sir," I answered. "Hi say, me lad," he laughed, "your mother h'is a grand lydie, you tike me word for h'it; h'in h'England they would decorate that suit with the h'order h'of the garter!" "Honi soit, qui mal y pense!" I lisped. A MAID OF YAVAPAI. To S. M. H. (AN IDYLLIC SKETCH.) People from every land sojourn in Arizona. From the Atlantic's sandy coasts, the icy shores of crystal lakes, from turbid miasmatic swamps--east, north and south, they come. Over mountain, canyon and gulch they roam, prospecting nature's grandest wonders. But the purest gold on Arizona's literary field, that was found by the genius of a lonesome valley's queen, the song-lark of our "Great Southwest." From the sheltering tree of her ancestral hall shyly she fluttered forth. Among stony crags of the sierra, on fearsome dizzy trails, in the somber shadows of virgin forests, in the rustling of wind-blown leaves (the seductive swish of elfin skirts) she heard the voices of Juno's sylvan train. Enchanted she listened to the syren's call, and ere the echo died within her ear she had devoted her talent to literature, a priestess self-ordained in Arizona's temple of the muses. In the flight of her poetic mind she met his majesty, king of the hills, the mountain-lion at the threshold of his lair and toyed with his cubs, princes and heirs to freedom. She heard the were-wolf scourge of herds, fierce lobos snarl in silent groves of timber and shivered at the coyote's piercing yelps from grave yards in the valleys.