The Castle, on the other hand, is the first thing seen by the railway traveller from London, just as it was the least likely in coaching days. When the Psalmist sings of the valleys being exalted and the mountains laid low, he parallels the changes wrought at Shrewsbury by the railway, for the traffic that came in by Wyle Cop has been wholly transferred to another line of route, where the Castle is the most prominent object. If there were ever one who, alighting at Shrewsbury station and, entering the station-yard, failed to see the Castle, he surely would be blind to the light of day, for the frowning battlements that even now glower down from their craggy foothold, after eight hundred years, overhang very dramatically the cabs and carriages, the portmanteaus and Gladstone bags of modern life. The keep is all that is left of the original Norman stronghold. The outworks have disappeared these hundreds of years past, and the walls of the keep itself have been patched and re-faced. Impressive still is that ancient fortress in sunshine, but infinitely grand when the sun is setting, the lights of the station begin to twinkle, and the signal-lamps to gleam green and red. Then those ponderous turrets and ruddy walls take on a silhouetted blackness that effectually hides the innovations and the modern touches only too visible in the broad eye of day. Shrewsbury School is as prominent as the Castle itself, on the way up into the town; a school no longer since modern buildings have been raised on the other side of the Severn. Now used as a Public Library and Museum, and with a seated bronze statue of Darwin, its last famous scholar, in front, it fitly enshrines within its noble Tudor walls many records of Shrewsbury’s and Shropshire’s past. One thing, certainly, the visitor to Shrewsbury cannot, nay, must not, fail of doing. He must not neglect the delicacy peculiar to the town— A Shrewsbury cake of Pailin’s best make, as Ingoldsby has it in his “Bloudie Jacke of Shrewsberrie.” Only Pailin no longer makes Shrewsbury cakes. He has long been gathered to his fathers, and let us hope he is quiring with the celestial throng. But, if Pailin be dead, the making of the especial cakes goes on unfailingly, and the eating of them is a rite—a canonical observance almost. Over against the shop where the original Pailin earned his undying fame—why has Shrewsbury no statue to him?—is the courtyard that gives access to that wonderfully beautiful timbered building, the Council House, the spot where, in bygone days, the Council of the Marches governed the Principality of Wales and these marchlands. “Lords’ Place” they sometimes name this vice-regal court.