The Iron Man.
By Henry J. Brent.
PART I.
Part of the house, or hall, as it was called, was very old, and the other portion was comparatively new. Its newness would have been considered very old in this country; and the old part would have been thought almost eternal anywhere.
This hall was situated on a rising knoll of ground, and overlooked a meadow, through which ran a glittering stream, and the widest spreading beeches waved in the almost perpetual breeze that leisurely and happily came up the ravine. What the owner had built of fortifications in the time of Bothwell, and Murray, and Mary Stuart, could, with some aid of the feudal imagination, be traced from the eastern wing—that was the oldest—down to the river's bank. Ivy had crept, with its deep green family of leaves and tendrils, over the vague line of conflict wall, and it was not difficult to picture a rather hard fight along the barrier, between the old chief and some implacable clan whose remotest ancestor had had his toes trod upon by the remotest ancestor of the knight of the castle, in the remotest era of Scotch-hatred tradition.
This old hall was approachable from every point of the compass, by winding avenues, and all these avenues seemed to have been constructed with the leading thought that they were to show the enemy at all points of his approach.
The hall was of red granite, and had its turrets, whence some retainer, too lazy to work in the fields, could espy the banner of an
