I used to listen to my mother telling the stories of the place in her sweet grave voice. She and my father had charge of the Castle, and we lived in the rooms over the grand old gateway. My mother often went round with visitors, for people came from afar to see the ruins. I liked to follow her, holding her gown bashfully, and wondering how mother knew that Queen Elizabeth had come there once, or that Simon De Montford, with a great army, marched up the valley one dark night and took the Castle by storm. 'Were you here, mother, when Queen Elizabeth came?' I asked her once. 'Oh no, Willie.' 'Then how do you know she ever came and stayed in the Queen's Tower?' 'They say she did,' mother said, smoothing my curly head. 'But do you believe it, mother? How can you tell if it is true?' 'Little Willie,' I remember that she answered, 'we must believe many things without seeing them,' and I thought that she looked up to somewhere higher than even the great Queen's Tower. I thought a little, and then said-- 'What a great person she must have been. Would you like to have been her, mother?' 'Oh, no, no,' and mother smiled, and then knelt down and kissed me. 'My own little son.' I did not know what that had to do with Queen Elizabeth, and I don't know now, but I felt very sure that no queen, however grand, could ever have been like my mother. She, I thought, was more like an angel, and I believed I knew quite well how the angels look. For under the ruined roof of the Castle chapel was a sculptured angel's head with folded wings. It had just such a face as my mother's, with the same peaceful brow and loving downward look. Sometimes I see her still. She comes to me through the long years at night, and we are together again--not as now, I so old and withered, she so young and fair--but as it used to be when I fell asleep, a tired child, on her shoulder. And I think that when the night--I mean death--really comes for me, and I lie down to sleep, that God will send her for me, and that she will take me, her weary son, in her dear arms once more. I was an only child, but not a lonely one. On the other side of the ruins, only much lower down, close to the stream that ran under the Castle cliff, was the forester's cottage, where lived Hildred, my friend and playfellow. It was a pretty cottage with a thatched roof, half buried in climbing roses. The pleasant rippling of the stream sounded there close at hand. We heard the water, too, up at the gate-house, but more faintly. There it was the distant rush of the stream tumbling noisily over some rocks before it took up its quiet song again at a lower level.