ce married,
and his second wife survived him. That forlorn lady had much to endure
from the first family, and notably from the wife of Macalpine's eldest
son and heir. The widow took a very dramatic way of publicly showing her
grievances. Once after the service in the kirk was over, she stepped up,
with her fan in her hand, to the corner of the kirkyard, and, taking off
her high-heeled slipper, she tapped with it on the stone laid over her
husband's grave, crying out through her tears, "_Macalpine! Macalpine!
rise up for ae half-hour and see me richted!_"

A diverting legend explains the _low-lying situation of Ballindalloch
Castle_, a beautiful specimen of baronial architecture, standing near
the junction of the Spey and the Avon. In planning the place, somewhere
about 1545, the laird fully intended to secure a wide prospect, and to
that end, chose a commanding site. But his views did not commend
themselves to the Powers of the Air, and the masons could make no
progress. Every night, when the workers had retired from building the
walls, a prodigious gale came roaring from the summit of Ben Rinnes and
swept stones and mortar into the bed of the Avon. The laird, sorely
puzzled at this strange phenomenon, lay in watch one night, with the
result that he was blown off his feet, and landed right up among the
branches of a holly-tree. Having taken the conceit out of the laird in
this abrupt way, the Mysterious Power, chuckling in fiendish fashion,
called out "_Build on the cow-haugh_." Frightened out of his wits, the
laird was only too glad to comply.

THE WISHING WELL.

Round the old Castle of Rothes clings a legend of a more pathetic kind.
"Fierce wars and faithful loves shall moralise my song," says Spenser,
and it is with these well-worn but ever-fresh subjects that the story
deals. The heiress of one of the old lairds of Rothes, being allowed to
roam at will with her foster-mother, cast an eye of love on the son of
the laird of Arndilly. As in ballad lore, the love seems to have been
immediate, reciprocal, and unquenchable. The girl's father, hearing of
the attachment, summarily forbade it, and commanded his daughter to turn
her back on young Arndilly, and take a different road in future. But as
journeys end in lovers meeting, the two young people, by whatever way
they set out, invariably met at the _Wishing Well_. A sad severance
came, however, for young Arndilly, like so many mediaeval knights of song
who had fait