he air of a shrine. And it was,
indeed, the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it
gives light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old ballad of
"Johnnie Faa"--she who, at the call of the gipsies' songs, "came
tripping down the stair, and all her maids before her." Some people say
the ballad has no basis in fact, and have written, I believe,
unanswerable papers to the proof. But in the face of all that, the very
look of that high oriel window convinces the imagination, and we enter
into all the sorrows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive the burthen of
the long, lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick head against the
mullions, and saw the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the
children at play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray. We
conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her some
snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her eyes
overflowed at the memory of the past. And even if the tale be not true
of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is true in the
essence of all men and women: for all of us, some time or other, hear
the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour cast. Some resist and
sit resolutely by the fire. Most go and are brought back again, like
Lady Cassilis. A few, of the tribe of Waring, go and are seen no more;
only now and again, at springtime, when the gipsies' song is afloat in
the amethyst evening, we can catch their voices in the glee.

By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the day.
Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon battled the
other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying silver; the town
came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables, bestridden by smooth
white roofs, and spangled here and there with lighted windows. At either
end the snow stood high up in the darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth
and among the chimneys of the Castle. As the moon flashed a bull's-eye
glitter across the town between the racing clouds, the white roofs
leaped into relief over the gables and the chimney-stacks, and their
shadows over the white roofs. In the town itself the lit face of the
clock peered down the street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli's
bell, and from behind the red curtains of a public-house some one
trolled out--a compatriot of Burns, again!--"The saut tear blin's my
e'e."

Next morning there were sun and a flapping wind. From