remorse. How you would have heaped up the fire and gnawed your
fingers! I think it would have come to homicide before the evening--if
it were only for the pleasure of seeing something red! And the masters
of Dunure, it is to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.
One of these vaults where the snow had drifted was that "black voute"
where "Mr. Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel," endured his
fiery trials. On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr.
Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his cook,
his pantryman, and another servant, bound the poor Commendator "betwix
an iron chimlay and a fire," and there cruelly roasted him until he
signed away his abbacy. It is one of the ugliest stories of an ugly
period, but not, somehow, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as
makes it hard to sympathise quite seriously with the victim. And it is
consoling to remember that he got away at last, and kept his abbacy,
and, over and above, had a pension from the Earl until he died.

Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly aspect,
opened out. Colzean plantations lay all along the steep shore, and there
was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the trees made a sort of
shadowy etching over the snow. The road went down and up, and past a
blacksmith's cottage that made fine music in the valley. Three
compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a cart. They were all drunk, and
asked me jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. I told them it was;
and my answer was received with unfeigned merriment. One gentleman was
so much tickled he nearly fell out of the cart; indeed, he was only
saved by a companion, who either had not so fine a sense of humour or
had drunken less.

"The toune of Mayboll," says the inimitable Abercrummie,[41] "stands
upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south.
It hath one principall street, with houses upon both sides, built of
freestone, and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles, one
at each end of this street. That on the east belongs to the Erle of
Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, which belonged sometime to the
laird of Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is adorned with a
pyremide [conical roof], and a row of ballesters round it raised from
the top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a fyne clock.
There be four lanes which pass from the principall street; one is called
the Back Venn