casting.

I wandered on in unhappiness, oppressed by that feeling of terror and
disconsolateness so peculiar to one's more frightful dreams. The
country seemed everywhere a desert. The fields were roughened with
tufts of furze and broom; hedgerows had shot up into lines of stunted
trees, with wide gaps interposed; cottage and manor-house had alike
sunk into ruins; here the windows still retained their shattered
frames, and the roof-tree lay rotting amid the dank vegetation of the
floor; yonder the blackness of fire had left its mark, and there
remained but reddened and mouldering stone. Wild animals and doleful
creatures had everywhere increased. The toad puffed out his freckled
sides on hearths whose fires had been long extinguished, the fox
rustled among its bushes, the masterless dog howled from the thicket,
the hawk screamed shrill and sharp as it fluttered overhead. I passed
what had been once the policies of a titled proprietor. The trees lay
rotting and blackened among the damp grass--all except one huge giant
of the forest, that, girdled by the axe half a man's height from the
ground, and scorched by fire, stretched out its long dead arms towards
the sky. In the midst of this wilderness of desolation lay broken
masses, widely scattered, of what had been once the mansion-house. A
shapeless hollow, half filled with stagnant water, occupied its
immediate site; and the earth was all around torn up, as if battered
with cannon. The building had too obviously owed its destruction to
the irresistible force of gunpowder.

There was a parish church on the neighbouring eminence, and it, too,
was roofless and a ruin. Alas! I exclaimed, as I drew aside the rank
stalks of nightshade and hemlock that hedged up the breach in the wall
through which I passed into the interior--alas! have the churches of
Scotland also perished? The inscription of a mutilated tombstone that
lay outside caught my eye, and I paused for a moment's space in the
gap to peruse it. It was an old memorial of the times of the Covenant,
and the legend was more than half defaced. I succeeded in deciphering
merely a few half sentences--'killing-time,' 'faithful martyr,'
'bloody Prelates;' and beneath there was a fragmentary portion of the
solemn text, 'How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and
avenge our blood?' I stepped into the interior: the scattered remains
of an altar rested against the eastern gable. There was a crackling as
of broken