On the opposite shore the rock is nearly perpendicular, the dog-rose and the bramble hiding its crevices, and the crawling campanula wreathing its bright bells about the sterile front, from which its sustenance was derived, like youth clinging to the cold and insensate bosom of age.  The declivity sloping abruptly from the tower was then covered with a wild and luxuriant underwood, stunted ash and hazel twigs thinly occupying a succession of ridges to the summit.  Here and there a straggling oak threw its ungraceful outline over a narrow path, winding immediately under the base of the hill,—­its bare roots undermined by oozings from above, and giving way to the slow but certain operation of the destroyer.  From the heat and dryness of the season the torrent was much diminished, rushing into a succession of deep pools, which the full free light of heaven had scarcely ever visited.  Now dimly seen through the hot gleams of a summer evening, they seemed wavering in the lurid reflection from surrounding objects.

Up this narrow gorge had strayed Sir John Finett with a companion, too busily engaged, it might seem, in their own converse to note the lapse of time, and the probable consequences of the king’s displeasure.

“Fair lady,” said the gay cavalier, “I am not more bold than my vocation holdeth meet.  Your cousin, at Myerscough, was so liberal of his own suit, and my countenance therein, that he hath entrusted this love-billet to my keeping, warning me that I should let none but yourself be privy to its delivery.”

“Would that my cousin had eschewed letter-writing!  I am averse to his suit, and yet he ceaseth not to vex me continually with his drivelling ditties.  His ballad-mongering to these ‘eyne’ alone would set up one of your court rhymesters for a twelvemonth.”

“Yet may aversion cease, and your mislikings be not over difficult to assuage,” said the courtier.

“I doubt not but Sir John Finett speaks of the capricious and changeable humours he hath witnessed;—­our country fashion holdeth not so lightly by its affection or disfavour.”

“Then there be doubtless of those stout vessels that shall never leak out a lady’s favour.  That this lot were mine!”

Sir John, perhaps unconsciously, threw his dark eyes full upon the lady, who blushed deeply; but the gloom concealed this outward show of feeling, too unformed and indefinite for thought.  She spoke not; but the knight, under cover of his errand, continued the discourse without awakening her alarm.  He excelled in that specious, though apparently heedless raillery, which is so apt to slip without suspicion into a lady’s ear; and he could ply his suit, under this disguise, with such seeming artlessness and unconcern, that a lodgement in the citadel was sometimes effected ere the garrison was aware of the intrusion.