256 THE DOVER ROAD 



discipline and courage were so to seek that it needed but 

 the daring of a Dover merchant and a few followers to 

 capture it. With this exploit ends the story of the 

 warlike doings here, and all that is left to tell relates 

 only to Marlborough's French prisoners, who were for 

 years cooped up within these walls pining and eating 

 away their hearts for very love and despair of ever 

 reaching la belle France, whose outlines they could 

 dimly see from the narrow embrasures of their foreign 

 prison. 



For from Dover Keep the Eye of Faith may discern 

 the coast of France, twenty-one miles across the 

 Silver Streak ; but there be those to w^hom, if visible 

 at all, that coast seems like nothing so much as filmy 

 clouds resting upon the water, and there are but few 

 days when the sun and the absence of sea-mists enable 

 the Englishman's straining eyes clearly to discern 

 that land. 



The famous well of Dover Castle still exists, enclosed 

 in the massive w^alls, and still nearly three hundred 

 feet deep, despite the rubbish and unmentionable 

 abominations cast into it by the prisoners, who chiefly 

 occupied the second floor in which are the Norman 

 Chapel and two large rooms, their walls still bearing 

 traces of the prisoners' handiwork in the shape of 

 inscriptions. Here is the Armoury, with matchlocks, 

 Brown Besses, muskets, and rifles ; obsolete and in use. 

 Here, too, are the pikes issued to the peasantry when all 

 England armed to resist Napoleon's threatened invasion. 

 Down below (you can see it from those embrasures) is 

 " Queen Elizabeth's Pocket Pistol," familiar, even to 

 those who have never seen it, by the popular rhyme — 



Load me well and keep me clean, 

 And I'll carry a ball to Calais Green ; 



and all around are batteries old and new. 



The sentry on Dover Keep at night, when all the 

 world is still, has leisure for contemiDlation. When the 

 moon rises in solemn majesty on summer nights and 



