advancing Highland foray, and could quickly, in most unmistakable Scotch, arouse the not unwilling chief and his vassals to a skull. cracking and throat-cutting difficulty.
When I was there, some few years past, peace reigned over this old Scotch residence, and beauty, throughout the year, hovered over the mingled colors of the time-stained walls, and over the most profuse and luxuriant combinations of foliage that I have ever seen.
The weather-tinted turrets rose in the still and beautiful gray air incident to the climate of that inspiring land, and a solemn repose pervaded the entire circuit of the scene.
I was an inmate of this dwelling for many years, and my hostess was one of a peculiarly distinguished name in Scotland. My hostess, for her husband had died a few weeks before my arrival, was far advanced in her pathway to the tomb, and grief had bowed the tenderest heart, the most noble head, that ever decked the divine form of woman.
Her apartments were in the old wing, and there she loved to sit. and muse over the legends that, in their traditionary popularity and close connection with general and more enlarged events, positively made the history of her family an adjunct to the history of the country.
I had been sitting by the bed-side of my venerable friend, one evening, and as the shadows came from the western sun we mutually sank into a state of listless repose.
She lay upon her bed, old and feeble, but full of wonderful memories. Her dark bright eye—so bright then, at eighty, and in her picture, painted when she was but eighteen, and which I fondly keep, bright as a star, and soft as the sweet air that floats it in the heavens—kept its gaze fixed steadily upon me, while her hand firmly held a bunch of antique keys, about whose history she had been all the evening talking.
The shades deepened with the hours, and the silence of the room was only broken by the occasional jingle of those queer old keys, held in the withered hand of the withering invalid. Now and then I turned from my gaze upon the purpling mountains that barriered toward the west the famous lake-region of Scotland, and glanced
