And two or three windows, looking from the first floor on this still blooming garden, presented no less striking a contrast to the rest of the castle, than the garden itself afforded to the remainder of the great court. Their florid decorations were sharp and fresh; their glass was bright and clear; and white curtains within might temper the radiance of the mid-day sun. But, everywhere else, the progress of decay was manifest: the Gothic tracery was crumbling away; panes were frequently wanting in the casements; and when they were perfect, the winter spray and summer dust had rendered them nearly opaque. Weeds grew between the stones and on the ledges of the walls; and long creeping-plants hung from the battlements, and waved mournfully in the wind. Desolation reigned paramount over Trevethlan Castle. Nor did the interior of the building belie its external aspect. The state bed-chamber was a sample of all the rest. In many of the rooms the dust had been undisturbed for nearly thirty years. But two were exceptions to the general neglect: one, the gallery to which Mr. Trevethlan referred, where hung the portraits of the family, generation after generation, from the days of Holbein to those of Reynolds. This was the favourite walk of Mrs. Griffith, the wife of the steward, whose office had been hereditary in his family almost from the earliest of those portraits. Mrs. Griffith used to spend much of her spare time in the gallery, walking to and fro with a long flapper of feathers in her hand, gently and reverentially brushing the dust from the pictures, and never passing that which was turned to the wall without a deep sigh. The last Mrs. Trevethlan--a new Griselda--had been treated with civil neglect by her husband, and died under the weight of her position, after bearing him the son and daughter already introduced. She was the child of a small tenant upon the estate; and Mr. Trevethlan, having attained the only object of his marriage, checked some presumption of her family with marked disdain. The maternal care and early education of his children devolved upon Mrs. Griffith, and the portrait-gallery was their usual school-room. Here they learned the history of their family as the history of England: not a bad _memoria technica_, but one attended with some risk. However, it may easily be guessed that they had no hard task-mistress, and that battledore-and-shuttlecock often interrupted the story of Queen Elizabeth's maid-of-honour, or of the colonel who fell in endeavouring to rally Fairfax's horse at Marston Moor.