Such a castle, in the extremity of the Highlands, was of course furnished with many a tale of tradition, and many a superstitious legend, to fill occasional intervals in the music and song, as proper to the halls of Dunvegan as when Johnson commemorated them.  We reviewed the arms and ancient valuables of this distinguished family—­saw the dirk and broadsword of Rorie Mhor, and his horn, which would drench three chiefs of these degenerate days.  The solemn drinking-cup of the Kings of Man must not be forgotten, nor the fairy banner given to Macleod by the Queen of Fairies; that magic flag which has been victorious in two pitched fields, and will still float in the third, the bloodiest and the last, when the Elfin Sovereign shall, after the fight is ended, recall her banner, and carry off the standard-bearer.

Amid such tales of ancient tradition I had from Macleod and his lady the courteous offer of the haunted apartment of the castle, about which, as a stranger, I might be supposed interested.  Accordingly, I took possession of it about the witching hour.  Except perhaps some tapestry hangings, and the extreme thickness of the walls, which argued great antiquity, nothing could have been more comfortable than the interior of the apartment; but if you looked from the windows the view was such as to correspond with the highest tone of superstition.  An autumnal blast, sometimes driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of the lake, which it occasionally concealed, and by fits disclosed.  The waves rushed in wild disorder on the shore, and covered with foam the steep piles of rock, which, rising from the sea in forms something resembling the human figure, have obtained the name of Macleod’s Maidens, and in such a night seemed no bad representatives of the Norwegian goddesses called Choosers of the Slain, or Riders of the Storm.  There was something of the dignity of danger in the scene; for on a platform beneath the windows lay an ancient battery of cannon, which had sometimes been used against privateers even of late years.  The distant scene was a view of that part of the Quillan mountains which are called, from their form, Macleod’s Dining-Tables.  The voice of an angry cascade, termed the Nurse of Rorie Mhor, because that chief slept best ’in its vicinity, was heard from time to time mingling its notes with those of wind and wave.  Such was the haunted room at Dunvegan, and as such it well deserved a less sleepy inhabitant.  In the language of Dr. Johnson, who has stamped his memory on this remote place, “I looked around me, and wondered that I was not more affected; but the mind is not at all times equally ready to be moved.”  In a word, it is necessary to confess that, of all I heard or saw, the most engaging spectacle was the comfortable bed, in which I hoped to make amends for some rough nights on ship-board, and where I slept accordingly without thinking of ghost or goblin till I was called by my servant in the morning.