Tradition, always busy, at least in Scotland, to grace with a legendary tale a spot in itself interesting, had ascribed a cause of peculiar veneration to this fountain.  A beautiful young lady met one of the Lords of Ravenswood while hunting near this spot, and, like a second Egeria, had captivated the affections of the feudal Numa.  They met frequently afterwards, and always at sunset, the charms of the nymph’s mind completing the conquest which her beauty had begun, and the mystery of the intrigue adding zest to both.  She always appeared and disappeared close by the fountain, with which, therefore, her lover judged she had some inexplicable connexion.  She placed certain restrictions on their intercourse, which also savoured of mystery.  They met only once a week—­Friday was the appointed day—­and she explained to the Lord of Ravenswood that they were under the necessity of separating so soon as the bell of a chapel, belonging to a hermitage in the adjoining wood, now long ruinous, should toll the hour of vespers.  In the course of his confession, the Baron of Ravenswood entrusted the hermit with the secret of this singular amour, and Father Zachary drew the necessary and obvious consequence that his patron was enveloped in the toils of Satan, and in danger of destruction, both to body and soul.  He urged these perils to the Baron with all the force of monkish rhetoric, and described, in the most frightful colours, the real character and person of the apparently lovely Naiad, whom he hesitated not to denounce as a limb of the kingdom of darkness.  The lover listened with obstinate incredulity; and it was not until worn out by the obstinacy of the anchoret that he consented to put the state and condition of his mistress to a certain trial, and for that purpose acquiesced in Zachary’s proposal that on their next interview the vespers bell should be rung half an hour later than usual.  The hermit maintained and bucklered his opinion, by quotations from Malleus Malificarum, Sprengerus, Remigius, and other learned demonologists, that the Evil One, thus seduced to remain behind the appointed hour, would assume her true shape, and, having appeared to her terrified lover as a fiend of hell, would vanish from him in a flash of sulphurous lightning.  Raymond of Ravenswood acquiesced in the experiment, not incurious concerning the issue, though confident it would disappoint the expectations of the hermit.

At the appointed hour the lovers met, and their interview was protracted beyond that at which they usually parted, by the delay of the priest to ring his usual curfew.  No change took place upon the nymph’s outward form; but as soon as the lengthening shadows made her aware that the usual hour of the vespers chime was passed, she tore herself from her lover’s arms with a shriek of despair, bid him adieu for ever, and, plunging into the fountain, disappeared from his eyes.  The bubbles occasioned by her descent were crimsoned with blood as they arose, leading the distracted Baron