[24] "The last trace of a dungeon answering the above description, with huge iron rings fixed in the walls, disappeared about sixty or seventy years ago."--_History of Wallingford_ (Hedges).
[25] It was a remark of this kind which turned Robert Bruce when fighting against his own people. "See," said an Englishman, as he saw Bruce eating with unwashed and reddened hands, "that Scotchman eating his own blood!"
Sad and weary were the hours to Osric which intervened between the death and burial of his grandfather. He gazed upon the dear face, where yet the parting look of love seemed to linger. The sense of desolation overwhelmed him--his earthly prospects were shattered, his dreams of ambition ended; but the dead spake not to console him, and the very heavens seemed as brass; his only consolation that he felt his lapse had been forgiven, that the departed one had died loving and blessing him.
The only true consolation in such hour of distress is that afforded by religion, but poor Osric could feel little of this; he had strayed so far from the gentle precepts which had guarded his boyhood: if he believed in religion, it was as when Satan looked into the gates of Paradise from afar. It was not his. He seemed to have renounced his portion and lot in it, to have sold himself to Satan, in the person of Brian Fitz-Count.
Yet, he could not even now _hate_ the Baron, as he ought to have done, according to all regulations laid down for such cases, made and provided, ever since men began to write novels. Let the reader enter into his case impartially. He had never known either paternal or maternal love--the mother, who had perished, was not even a memory; while, on the other hand, the destroyer had adopted him as a son, and been as a father to him, distinguishing him from others by an affection all the more remarkable as coming from a rugged nature, unused to tender emotions. Again, the horror with which we moderns contemplate such a scene as his dead grandfather had described, was far less vivid in one to whom such casualties had been of constant experience, and were regarded as the usual incidents of warfare. Our readers can easily imagine the way in which he would have regarded it before he had fallen under the training of Wallingford Castle.