around him.

When the last flask was emptied, they took their leave with deep
protestations--to be forgotten on the morrow, if, indeed, those who
made them should not think it necessary for their safety to make a more
solemn retractation.

Accepting their adieus with an air of contempt which he could scarce
conceal, Ravenswood at length beheld his ruinous habitation cleared of
their confluence of riotous guests, and returned to the deserted hall,
which now appeared doubly lonely from the cessation of that clamour to
which it had so lately echoed. But its space was peopled by phantoms
which the imagination of the young heir conjured up before him--the
tarnished honour and degraded fortunes of his house, the destruction
of his own hopes, and the triumph of that family by whom they had been
ruined. To a mind naturally of a gloomy cast here was ample room
for meditation, and the musings of young Ravenswood were deep and
unwitnessed.

The peasant who shows the ruins of the tower, which still crown the
beetling cliff and behold the war of the waves, though no mroe tenanted
saved by the sea-mew and cormorant, even yet affirms that on this
fatal night the Master of Ravenswood, by the bitter exclamations of his
despair, evoked some evil fiend, under whose malignant influence the
future tissue of incidents was woven. Alas! what fiend can suggest more
desperate counsels than those adopted under the guidance of our own
violent and unresisted passions?

CHAPTER III.

Over Gods forebode, then said the King,
That thou shouldst shoot at me.

William Bell, Clim 'o the Cleugh, etc.

On the morning after the funeral, the legal officer whose authority
had been found insufficient to effect an interruption of the funeral
solemnities of the late Lord Ravenswood, hastened to state before the
Keeper the resistance which he had met with in the execution of his
office.

The statesman was seated in a spacious library, once a banqueting-room
in the old Castle of Ravenswood, as was evident from the armorial
insignia still displayed on the carved roof, which was vaulted with
Spanish chestnut, and on the stained glass of the casement, through
which gleamed a dim yet rich light on the long rows of shelves, bending
under the weight of legal commentators and monkish historians, whose
ponderous volumes formed the chief and most valued contents of a
Scottish historian [library] of the period. On the massive oaken
table and r