inheritor of Caister, under this unlucky combination of circumstances, were intensely painful. She seemed degraded in the eyes of her own proper household, who lived in comparative comfort in her dower house in Norwich. Her establishment there was simple and orderly. She had no band of military retainers to govern; she had no apprehensions of violence by day or stratagem by night. Caister was to her a perpetual anxiety. For seven years her unhappy husband had struggled to maintain his claims against the most powerful noble of the day, and even against the cupidity of the crown itself. His wife had been left in the dismantled chambers of the fair castle, whilst he was pursuing the court of Edward IV. with his petitions; and the court answered by throwing him into prison as a suspected traitor. He died, without a friend to close his eyes, in a London inn. His family impoverished themselves still more, to bestow on the first heir of Caister a most sumptuous funeral. Three years had John Paston slept soundly under the floor of Broomholm Priory, but the possession of his castle was not one jot more secure to his son, although he had been honoured by the king, and could say with Falconbridge

"Well, now can I make any Joan a lady."

Mistress Margaret felt degraded as she entered the castle without provender for its defenders. She remembered the days, happier days for her, when old Fastolf dwelt in all splendour and liberal

hospitality in this, the castellated house which he had built at enormous expense. She had feasted in the Great Hall, in the bright summer season, when the gold flagons, and chargers, and standing cups, and salt-cellars, glistened in the sunny rays that came into that spacious room, through the windows rich with heraldic crimson and purple, where the columbine flower and the antelope, the badges of the house of Lancaster, shone amidst the or and azure of the Fastolf quarterings. She had sat, in the days of quiet domestic occupation, in the Winter Hall, when the bright wood-fire blazed amidst the andirons, and the cloth of arras with which the walls were hung, representing all the gambols of the morris-dance, brought the thoughts of May into the gloom of December. She had knelt in the chapel, where golden candlesticks and chalices, and images of St. Michael and our Lady, sometimes appeared to have more associations with worldly pride than heavenly humility. She had slept in the Great Chamber, and the White Chamber, and the Stranger's Chamber, all made luxurious with feather-beds, and pillows of down, and coverings of arras, and cushions of silk. In those days the buttery was stored with its "great and huge bottles," its tankards and its quartlets, its napery and its trencher-knives; and the kitchen was abundantly provided with its brass pots, its pike-pans, its ladles and skimmers, its spits, its dropping-pans, and its frying-pans. Now Mistress Margaret Paston looked upon bare walls, whether

in hall or chamber, in chapel or kitchen. The plate was gone, the tapestry was gone; the featherbeds and the pillows had given place to hard strawmattresses; the kitchen could boast only a cauldron, a frying-pan, and a spit; the buttery had no flagons of silver, though it maintained a show of conviviality in the display of six black jacks; the cellars were empty, save that a cask or two of hard and sour ale was absolutely necessary to prevent the men-at-arms altogether deserting their dreary post. Mistress Margaret knew something of all this; but she had not been to Caister for several months, and she little expected that the allies which Sir John had sent down-"the gentlemanly comfortable fellows," who had arrived in the preceding November-would have made such havoc with the white herring and the baconed herring, the salted chines and the Dutch cheeses.

Mistress Paston represses her anger, for she justly considers that honest Nicholas, who had kept the gate in the old days of abundance, when he had ale and beef without asking, to his heart's content, had scant blame for seeking in his own extremity, and to satisfy the clamour of his noisy fellow sufferers, a supply of something to keep life and soul together in these long-continued scambling days. Her sorrow, however, she could not suppress. To conceal it from those around her, she retires to the small and somewhat bare chamber which she reserved to her own use when sojourning at Caister. But before she seeks to bury her anxieties in sleep,

she sends for her yeoman of the buttery, he who had attended on the sumpter-mules from Norwich, and, like a discreet lady as she is, affects to regret the somewhat too earnest piety of Sir John Paston, in compelling his merry men to keep such an overstrict Lent. That should be at once amended. What did the panniers contain that he had brought from Norwich for the morrow's Maunday? The careful man set forth that, humbly presuming her ladyship's age to be forty-six, he had brought fortysix manchets of the finest bread for the alms on the morrow, and in the same way he had brought sufficient salted meat to cut into forty-six portions, each poor person receiving the same upon a treen platter. The lady proclaims that it is well; but it has occurred to her that as this was her son's household, and not her own, it would be more fitting if the almesse were regulated by her son's age, and not by hers; and so she directs that twenty-eight treen platters, with twenty-eight portions of bread and meat, should be distributed on the morrow, instead of the forty-six which had been provided. "And so," says the lady with a merry voice, "let Sir James Gloys bless the remaining meat and manchets for this evening's supper, and let Nicholas keep his herrings for the morrow's breakfast. And, good William, ask Nicholas's wife to come here and be my chamberer, and let her bring me a slice of manchet, for I am somewhat weary, with a cup of red wine of which you brought a pitcher or two for Sir James."

Mistress Margaret Paston descends from her solitary chamber, with a heavy heart, on the Maunday Thursday whose eve saw her son's retainers wanting a supper had a lucky device not suggested itself to her inventive mind. She comes into the Winter Hall, the somewhat snug room which, opening into the inner court, is sheltered from the keen east winds that blow from the neighbouring sea. The morning is raw and comfortless. She looks upon the bare walls, and thinks of the cloth of arras of the morris-dance with which they were wont to be lined. She sits down upon the hard bench, and the remembrance of the great fringed chairs that once combined all the requisites of state and comfort are present to her memory. She gazes upon the wide chimney, and recollects the polished andirons richly ornamented (it may be) with "Two winking Cupids

Of silver, each on one foot standing; "

and she sighs when she sees, as she had often seen before, that they are supplanted by two coarse uprights of undecorated and rusty iron. These are small matters, but they tell a tale. The real present evil is, that there is no fire on the hearth, and no attendant appears to procure one. She sits down and muses. Early rising is not a custom now in the household of Caister; for it has been found by experience that sleep is an abater of those cravings of the inner man which are most imperative in exercise and action. At length the wife of