Some time ago I chanced to visit the remains of what had once been a royal residence, and still looked majestic even in decay. It gave a saddened pleasure to thread its winding stairs, and pass dreamily from chamber to hall, and chapel to closet; to stand in its gloomy kitchens, with their huge fire-places, whose blackened sides told of many a roaring fagot that had ruddied merry faces in days long gone by; to creep stealthily into the sombre dungeons, so dank, earthy, and cold, and then winding cautiously back, to emerge into the light of the summer sun. The silent quadrangle had its encircling walls pierced with many a window, some of which had once been richly carved; but their mullions were now sorely wasted, while others, with broken lintels and shattered walls above, seemed only waiting for another storm to hurl them among the roofless chambers below. In the centre of the court-yard stood a ruined fountain. It had been grotesquely ornamented with heads of lions and griffins, and was said to have once run red with wine. But it was silent enough now; the hand of time, and a still surer enemy, the hand of man, had done their worst upon it; its groined arches and foliaged buttresses were broken and gone, and now its shattered beauty stood in meet harmony with the desolation that reigned around. I employed myself for a while in looking over the fragments, marking now the head of some fierce hippogryph, anon the limbs of some mimic knight clad in armour of proof, and ere long I stumbled on a delicately sculptured _fleur-de-lis_, that might have surmounted the toilet-window of some fair one of old. Turning it over, I found its unhewn side exhibited a still more delicately sculptured stigmaria. The incident was certainly simple enough, perhaps even trifling. And yet, occurring in a spot that seemed consecrated to reverie, it awoke a train of pleasant reflection. How wide the interval of time which was bridged across in that sculptured stone! Its one side carried the mind back but a few generations, the other hurried the fancy away over ages and cycles far into the dim shadows of a past eternity. The one told of a land of flowers, musical with the hum of the bee and the chantings of birds, and gladdened by the presence of man; the other told of a land luxuriant, indeed, in strange forms of vegetation--huge club-mosses, tall calamites, and waving ferns--yet buried in a silence that was only broken fitfully by the breeze as it shook the spiky catkins or the giant fronds of the forest. The _fleur-de-lis_ recalled memories of France--the sunny land of France--which stood out so brightly in the dreams of our school-days; the stigmaria conjured up visions of a land that was never gazed on by human eye, but rolled its rich champaign during the long ages of the Carboniferous era, and sometimes rises up dimly in the dreams of our maturer years. Between these two epochs how many centuries, how many cycles must have slowly rolled away! The