: Œuvres complètes de Mathurin Regnier accompagnées d'une notice biographique et bibliographique de variantes de notes d'un glossaire et d'un index by R Gnier Mathurin Courbet Ernest Editor - French poetry; Satire French

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COME-TO-GOOD 523

HISTORICAL NOTES 539

A TALK ABOUT SAINTS

A TALK ABOUT SAINTS

LETTING THE SUNLIGHT THROUGH!'

FOR YOU.

When the days are lengthening in the spring, even though the worst of the winter may be over, there is often a sharp tooth in the March wind as it sweeps over the angry sea and bites into the north-eastern coast of England.

Children, warm and snug in cosy rooms, like to watch the gale and the damage it does as it hurries past. It amuses them to see the wind at its tricks, ruffling up the manes of the white horses far out at sea, blowing the ships away from their moorings in the harbour, and playing tricks upon the passers-by, when it comes ashore. Off fly stout old gentlemen's hats, round like windmills go the smart ladies' skirts and ribbons; even the milkman's fingers turn blue with cold. It is all very well for children, safe indoors, to laugh at the antics of the mischievous wind, even on the bleak north-eastern coast nowadays; but in times long ago, that same wind could be a more cruel playfellow still. Come back with me for two hundred and fifty years. Let us watch the tricks the wind is playing on the prisoners in the castle high up on Scarborough cliff in the year of our Lord 1666.

Though the keen, cutting blast is the same, a very different Scarborough lies around us from the Scarborough modern children know. There is a much smaller town close down by the water's edge, and a much larger castle covering nearly the whole of the cliff.

Nowadays, when children go to Scarborough for their holidays in the summer, as they run down the steep paths with their spades and buckets to dig on the beach, they are too busy to pay much attention to the high cliff that juts out against the sky above the steep red roofs of the old town. But if they do look up for a moment they notice a pile of grey stones at the very top of the hill. 'Oh, that is the old ruined castle,' they say to themselves; and then they forget all about it and devote themselves to the important task of digging a new castle of their own that shall not crumble into ruins in its turn, as even sand castles have an uncomfortable way of doing, if they are unskilfully made.

Those children are only modern children. They have not gone back, as you and I are trying to do, two hundred and fifty long years up the stream of time. If we are really to find out what Scarborough looked like then, we must put on our thinking caps and flap our fancy wings, and, shutting our eyes very tight, not open them again until that long-ago Scarborough is really clear before us. Then, looking up at the castle, what shall we see? The same hill of course, but so covered with stately buildings that we can barely make out its outline. Instead of one old pile of crumbling stones, roofless, doorless, windowless, there is a massive fortress towering over us, ringed round with walls and guarded with battlements and turrets. High above all stands the frowning Norman Keep, of which only some of the thick outer stones remain to-day. Scarborough Castle was a grand place, and a strong place too, in the seventeenth century.

In order to reach it, then as now, it was necessary to climb the long flights of stone steps that stretch up from the lower town near the water's edge to the high, arched gateway upon the Castle Hill. We will climb those steps, only of course the stones were newer and cleaner then, and less worn by generations of climbing feet. Up them we mount till we reach the gateway with its threatening portcullis, where the soldiers of King Charles the Second, in their jackboots, are walking up and down on guard, determined to keep out all intruders. Intruders we certainly are, seeing that we belong to another generation and another century. There is no entrance at that gateway for us. Yet except through that gateway there is no way into the castle, and all the windows on this side are high up in the walls, and barred and filled with strong thick glass.

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