Ann was good to all beggars as well as to old Jack, the watercress man, and when I asked her about it once she told the story of the Castle of Leaves. This castle was a ruin above the sea near where she was born. So fragmentary and fallen was it that every November the oak leaves covered it up. As a little child, Ann was taken up there on a May day because the hawthorn growing there always blossomed in time, however backward the season. Sitting among the ruins was an old white-haired man playing on a harp, and for ever after she loved beggars, said Aurelius, as if they were all going to have harps and long white beards in due course. A white-haired beggar, according to tradition, was infallibly to be found by anyone who went up to the Castle of Leaves on May day, and the story which connects a beggar with the early days of the castle might of itself explain why Ann never denied a beggar. Both Mr Morgan and Ann knew the story, but Mr Morgan had found it written in a book, with the date 1399, while Ann told it without a date as she remembered it from the dark ages of her own childhood. In those old days, if Ann was to be believed, there was nothing but war. The young men went out to battle and never came back except as spirits, or as old men, or as worse than either--some of them having no more legs or arms than a fish, some crawling on their bellies with their beards in the mud, or flapping along in the wind like a kind of bird, or as lean and scattered as crickets--so that the children laughed at them first and then ran away crying to their mothers because they had such fathers. The mothers did not laugh save those that went mad, and perhaps they were not the worst off. The women knew that these strange idols and images crawling and jiggering home were the same that had marched out to the war as if their sweethearts were in the far countries before them, instead of behind them at the turnings of the roads. They would not have loved them so much if they had not gone out like that. The glorious young men departed; the young women were no longer beautiful without them; the little children were blossoms of the grave. The world was full of old men, maimed men, and young men going to the wars, and of women crying because the soldiers had not come back, and children crying because they had. And many and many a one had no more tears left to cry with.