312 The Unknown River. 



places I ever saw in the course of all my wanderings, a 

 place where a rich avenue came down to the water's 

 edge. I left the canoe and walked up between the 

 stately trees. When the long avenue came to an end 

 I found myself in a noble demesne with a little lake, 

 and an island in the middle of it. On that island once 

 stood a noble feudal castle, where royal guests have been 

 entertained ; and the castle lasted, in all its strength, till 

 the last century, when a great fire gutted it from roof 

 to basement. It would have been a noble ruin, but the 

 marquis, its proprietor, in sheer anger at the accident, 

 utterly effaced every vestige of the stronghold of his 

 ancestors ; so that literally not one stone remains upon 

 another. An exquisite old gateway, of the loveliest 

 Renaissance work, with sculpture as delicate as that 

 of Melrose, has been re-erected at a little distance by 

 the present owner, who inhabits a simple modern house. 

 He intends to build a new castle more worthy of his an- 

 cient name ; but an ancestral mansion, once destroyed, 

 can never be replaced. Even an ancient avenue may 

 be replaced in time : young trees will grow old, and they 

 succeed each other naturally in generations ; but the real 

 feudal castle is one of those things that neither man nor 

 Nature restores when once it is destroyed and lost. We 

 may build an imitation of it, but not the thing itself ; the 

 spirit that created it has departed, never to return. 

 There was something terribly childish in the anger of 

 that old marquis ! The flames had destroyed the wood- 

 work ; and so, in a pet, he finished what they could not 

 achieve, and levelled all his towers ! 



