It is a relief to mount a winding stair in the thickness of the walls and emerge into the free fresh air. The panorama over city and rolling country is charming, and my red auto down there at the portal re-assuring, but neither can hold us long from a renewed contemplation of this château. Passing down into the court, we cross a grassy enclosure towards the walls, and the tower of the Martelet, where we descend ninety-six steps into prisons cut in the solid rock, passing four floors of them; the first was for ordinary prisoners and is of no interest, as there is too much sunlight and air. In the dungeon just below was imprisoned for ten years Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, a prisoner of Louis XII. in 1500. These walls are covered with carvings made during those ten years. There are many inscriptions and this carved face before us is said to be his portrait. Below is the name: "Ludovico." A sort of shadow of daylight penetrates through a small, heavily barred window in the wall twelve feet thick, and opposite this Ludovico deeply engraved in the stone a dial plate, which permitted him to know the passing of the hours. Further downward in the rock you find another prison where Francis I. confined the father of Diane de Poitiers, whose hair whitened in a single night. This prison is more gloomy than the one above it. We find here the name of one of the officers in the Scotch guard of Louis XI., "Ebenezer Kelburn." In the centre of the chamber there is an oubliette to the darkness below. Down there are the fosses waiting for more victims, which in the days when this chamber above was used for the torture, were not slow in coming. [Illustration: LOUIS XI. From the engraving by Hoopwood] Pontbrillant, governor of Loches, who certainly knew all the secrets of the donjons found an iron door which, upon being forced open, led in to a long passage cut in the rock, which conducted to a chamber far under ground, where was seated upon a stone a gigantic man, holding his head in his hands. The admission of the air reduced him instantly to dust, and in like manner, there crumbled away a little coffer of wood which had enclosed some linen, very white and carefully folded. Who or what he had been was never known. In the oubliette of the tower, is to be read an inscription which shows that the Revolution placed its seal upon Loches: "Without fear, we destroy the high walls, break the chains, and cause to disappear the tortures invented by the King, too weak to arrest a people moving to liberty.--1785" Doubtless this fortress would repay weeks of research and yield up many a present unknown dungeon, each with its grizzly horror and tale of distress. Against modern artillery it would have little show, but in the Middle Ages it was almost impregnable.