the morning, while it dispelled the shades of night, had a composing and sedative effect upon the stormy passions by which the Master of Ravenswood had been agitated on the preceding day.  He now felt himself able to analyse the different feelings by which he was agitated, and much resolved to combat and to subdue them.  The morning, which had arisen calm and bright, gave a pleasant effect even to the waste moorland view which was seen from the castle on looking to the landward; and the glorious ocean, crisped with a thousand rippling waves of silver, extended on the other side, in awful yet complacent majesty, to the verge of the horizon.  With such scenes of calm sublimity the human heart sympathises even in its most disturbed moods, and deeds of honour and virtue are inspired by their majestic influence.  To seek out Bucklaw in the retreat which he had afforded him, was the first occupation of the Master, after he had performed, with a scrutiny unusually severe, the important task of self-examination.  “How now, Bucklaw?” was his morning’s salutation—­“how like you the couch in which the exiled Earl of Angus once slept in security, when he was pursued by the full energy of a king’s resentment?”

“Umph!” returned the sleeper awakened; “I have little to complain of where so great a man was quartered before me, only the mattress was of the hardest, the vault somewhat damp, the rats rather more mutinous than I would have expected from the state of Caleb’s larder; and if there had been shutters to that grated window, or a curtain to the bed, I should think it, upon the whole, an improvement in your accommodations.”

“It is, to be sure, forlorn enough,” said the Master, looking around the small vault; “but if you will rise and leave it, Caleb will endeavour to find you a better breakfast than your supper of last night.”

“Pray, let it be no better,” said Bucklaw, getting up, and endeavouring to dress himself as well as the obscurity of the place would permit—­“let it, I say, be no better, if you mean me to preserve in my proposed reformation.  The very recollection of Caleb’s beverage has done more to suppress my longing to open the day with a morning draught than twenty sermons would have done.  And you, master, have you been able to give battle valiantly to your bosom-snake?  You see I am in the way of smothering my vipers one by one.”

“I have commenced the battle, at least, Bucklaw, adn I have had a fair vision of an angel who descended to my assistance,” replied the Master.

“Woe’s me!” said his guest, “no vision can I expect, unless my aunt, Lady Grinington, should betake herself to the tomb; and then it would be the substance of her heritage rather than the appearance of her phantom that I should consider as the support of my good resolutions.  But this same breakfast, Master—­does the deer that is to make the pasty run yet on foot, as the ballad has it?”