no narrow chink of any kind communicating with the sweet upper air. The bare damp clay is all that is at the bottom of them, all round them at regular intervals are horizontal apertures, where we were told rings had once been to tie the prisoners up to, and the sad fact seemed but too conspicuously apparent for any less barbarous explanation. A large ancient gothic door in the inner ward, and not far from the inner gate, leads to these, from which there is a descent of stone steps, apparently the very same over which the bleached visages of those miserable prisoners must have come and gone. Grim, defiant faces, full of mad daring, and a wild half noble heroism, they rise upon the imagination; and what numbers of them must have passed that fearful threshold in the days when the slogan broke the bright silences of morning and evening full often round the purple hills of the border, and the hot-trod[1] was a common spectacle and a common fear to the irreclaimable moss-trooper. What numbers also must have repassed it to swift and summary execution, or in another fearful form as livid corpses, whose ghastly emaciations no bed had comforted, and whose last irrepressible sorrows no eye had watched, and no ear heard.
The outer and inner wards of the castle are separated by a wall and tower gate. The great tower, or keep, and the principal buildings of the castle, including those
- ↑ The hot-trod was a pursuit maintained with a lighted piece of turf carried on a spear with hue and cry, and bugle, horn, and blood-hound, and all who heard the alarm were expected to join in the chase. In many of the villages there were blood-hounds kept for this purpose.
