There is a legend told of the great well in the court-yard of one of the old English castles, at the period of the Parliamentary wars, which comes into mind when the cruel facts of her life are remembered. Sir Hugh, the Cavalier, had seen his castle surprised, taken and sacked by the Cromwellian troopers, guided and led on by a roundhead churl who owed him gratitude instead of ill-service--had been wounded and made prisoner, while the females of his family were maltreated and the pictures that made half his ancestral pride stabbed and hacked in pieces by the ruffians who could not enough outrage the living members of his race. Then the tide of fortune had turned; he had once more regained his strong-hold, with manly arms around him, and those of his dear ones who had not perished by outrage and exposure, once more under his sheltering hand. Then the recreant roundhead neighbor fell one day into his hands, and the cruel blood of the Norman ancestors who had begun _their_ robbery and rapine on English soil at Hastings, rose up in the breast of Sir Hugh and made him for the time a very fiend of revenge. The great well had been ruined by the corpses thrown into it at the sacking of the castle; and into that well, in spite of his struggles, he had the poor wretch lowered by his retainers, then the slight rope cut away and the victim left to cling to the slippery stones at the edge of the water thirty feet below, unable to climb them, too desperate to sink, and wailing out his cries for mercy, while a huge lamp, lowered by another rope, showed the whole terrible spectacle to the pitiless eyes that dared look down upon it. Then another rope was lowered by the great windlass, within reach of the struggling wretch, and he was allowed to seize hold upon it and climb a little way from the water, under the belief that his tyrant had at last relented and that he was to be allowed to save himself after that dreadful trial. Then, when he had climbed for a few feet from the black ooze beneath him, the rope was lowered away and the poor wretch again submerged, to shriek, and wail, and climb again, and to be again dropped back at the moment of transient hope, until the wearied fingers could cling and climb no longer and the life thus outraged and the light which had revealed that sad refinement upon cruelty went horribly out together! And how much less cruel was Fate, thus standing guard over the life of Eleanor Hill and dropping her back again into her own shame at every attempt which she made to escape from it or to rise above it,--than the grim and grizzled old Sir Hugh who had been made a human fiend by his past wrongs and the bandit blood of his race?