There is, however, little real excuse for these unavailing regrets in Winchester, for she above all places has store of real history--and such history, too--enough and to spare. Here, for instance, in the West Gate adjoining the Castle Hall, and in the Obelisk just beyond the circuit of the old walls, this vividness of history meets us again. Formerly the West Gate was a blockhouse as much as a gate. You can still see where the portcullis worked up and down, and look down from the battlements of the roof through the machicolated openings which enabled defenders to meet assailants with molten lead and kindred compliments. Later on it was a prison. On the walls of the splendid old chamber above the gateway we can see elaborate designs carved out by one poor prisoner after another, to while away the tedium and to help him to forget the miseries of his imprisonment. Now the West Gate is a museum with a collection of rare local interest: early weights and measures of the days when Winchester could still impose its standards upon others, weapons and armour, the gibbet of the executioner, and the axe of the headsman. But strong for defence as the West Gate and city wall were, the Obelisk beyond recalls to us one foe whom no bar could exclude, no bolt restrain; for though in 1666 Winchester was straitly shut up like Jericho of old, and none went out and none came in, that grim and relentless assailant, the Plague, passed all barriers unchallenged, and Winchester became as a city of the dead. Then--for none dared approach--the country people held their market without and chaffered for their wares at safe distance with the men upon the wall, and the Obelisk, erected in 1759, serves to commemorate the spot where marketing was done for Winchester citizens under such tragic conditions. Happily, plague has disappeared from our midst for some 250 years. In mediaeval days, right on indeed from 1348, the year of the Black Death, plague was all too common a visitant. The sister societies of Natives and Aliens still survive in Winchester, to carry on the work of relieving widows and orphans, first begun when plague laid its hand so heavily on the city in the ‘Annus Mirabilis’ and left so many widows and orphans to relieve.