One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others.
On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed
had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-
detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between their owners,
that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood in his own
doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two
enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and
bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires
at night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild
winter wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may
reconstruct for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was.
Not so when we are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us
only to intensify a contrary impression, and association is turned
against itself. I remember walking thither three afternoons in
succession, my eyes weary with being set against the wind, and how,
dropping suddenly over the edge of the down, I found myself in a new
world of warmth and shelter. The wind, from which I had escaped, 'as
from an enemy,' was seemingly quite local.
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