‘I believe,’ said the old man, ’half the people of the barony know that their poor auld laird is somewhere hereabout; for I see they do not suffer a single bairn to come here a bird-nesting; a practice whilk, when I was in full possession of my power as baron, I was unable totally to inhibit.  Nay, I often find bits of things in my way, that the poor bodies, God help them! leave there, because they think they may be useful to me.  I hope they will get a wiser master, and as kind a one as I was.’

A natural sigh closed the sentence; but the quiet equanimity with which the Baron endured his misfortunes had something in it venerable and even sublime.  There was no fruitless repining, no turbid melancholy; he bore his lot, and the hardships which it involved, with a good-humored, though serious composure, and used no violent language against the prevailing party.

‘I did what I thought my duty,’ said the good old man, ’and questionless they are doing what they think theirs.  It grieves me sometimes to look upon these blackened walls of the house of my ancestors; but doubtless officers cannot always keep the soldier’s hand from depredation and spuilzie, and Gustavus Adolphus himself, as ye may read in Colonel Munro his “Expedition with the Worthy Scotch Regiment called Mackay’s Regiment” did often permit it.  Indeed I have myself seen as sad sights as Tully-Veolan now is when I served with the Marechal Duke of Berwick.  To be sure we may say with Virgilius Maro, Fuimus Troes—­and there’s the end of an auld sang.  But houses and families and men have a’ stood lang eneugh when they have stood till they fall with honour; and now I hae gotten a house that is not unlike a domus ultima’—­they were now standing below a steep rock.  ‘We poor Jacobites,’ continued the Baron, looking up, ’are now like the conies in Holy Scripture (which the great traveller Pococke calleth Jerboa), a feeble people, that make our abode in the rocks.  So, fare you well, my good lad, till we meet at Janet’s in the even; for I must get into my Patmos, which is no easy matter for my auld stiff limbs.’

With that he began to ascend the rock, striding, with the help of his hands, from one precarious footstep to another, till he got about half-way up, where two or three bushes concealed the mouth of a hole, resembling an oven, into which the Baron insinuated, first his head and shoulders, and then, by slow gradation, the rest of his l ong body; his legs and feet finally disappearing, coiled up like a huge snake entering his retreat, or a long pedigree introduced with care and difficulty into the narrow pigeon-hole of an old cabinet.  Waverley had the curiosity to clamber up and look in upon him in his den, as the lurking-place might well be termed.  Upon the whole, he looked not unlike that ingenious puzzle called ‘a reel in a bottle,’ the marvel of children (and of some grown people too, myself for one), who can neither comprehend the mysteryhowit has got in or how it is