“Well, well, never mind,” said his master; “go to the stable.  There is hay and corn, I trust?”

“Ou ay, plenty of hay and corn”; this was uttered boldly and aloud, and, in a lower tone, “there was some half fous o’ aits, and soem taits o’ meadow-hay, left after the burial.”

“Very well,” said Ravenswood, taking the lamp from his domestic’s unwilling hand, “I will show the stranger upstairs myself.”

“I canna think o’ that, my lord; if ye wad but have five minutes, or ten minutes, or, at maist, a quarter of an hour’s patience, and look at the fine moonlight prospect of the Bass and North Berwick Law till I sort the horses, I would marshal ye up, as reason is ye suld be marshalled, your lordship and your honourable visitor.  And I hae lockit up the siller candlesticks, and the lamp is not fit——­”

“It will do very well in the mean time,” said Ravenswood, “and you will have no difficulty for want of light in the stable, for, if I recollect, half the roof is off.”

“Very true, my lord,” replied the trusty adherent, and with ready wit instantly added, “and the lazy sclater loons have never come to put it on a’ this while, your lordship.”

“If I were disposed to jest at the calamities of my house,” said Ravenswood, as he led the way upstairs, “poor old Caleb would furnish me with ample means.  His passion consists in representing things about our miserable menage, not as they are, but as, in his opinion, they ought to be; and, to say the truth, I have been often diverted with the poor wretch’s expedients to supply what he though was essential for the credit of the family, and his still more generous apologies for the want of those articles for which his ingenuity could discover no substitute.  But though the tower is none of the largest, I shall have some trouble without him to find the apartment in which there is a fire.”

As he spoke thus, he opened the door of the hall.  “Here, at least,” he said, “there is neither hearth nor harbour.”

It was indeed a scene of desolation.  A large vaulted room, the beams of which, combined like those of Westminster Hall, were rudely carved at the extremities, remained nearly in the situation in which it had been left after the entertainment at at Allan Lord Ravenswood’s funeral.  Overturned pitchers, and black-jacks, and pewter stoups, and flagons still cumbered the large oaken table; glasses, those more perishable implements of conviviality, many of which had been voluntarily sacrificed by the guests in their enthusiastic pledges to favourite toasts, strewed the stone floor with their fragments.  As for the articles of plate, lent for the purpose by friends and kinsfolk, those had been carefully withdrawn so soon as the ostentatious display of festivity, equally unnecessary and strangely timed, had been made and ended.  Nothing, in short, remained that indicated wealth; all the signs were those of recent wastefulness and present desolation.  The black cloth hangings,