" And this is how I endeavoured to obey.]

II. THE ENCHANTED CASTLE

Edward Waverley found his regiment quartered at Dundee in Scotland, but,
the time being winter and the people of the neighbourhood not very fond
of the "red soldiers," he did not enjoy the soldiering life so much as
he had expected. So, as soon as the summer was fairly come, he asked
permission to visit the Castle of Bradwardine, in order to pay his
respects to his uncle's friend.

It was noon of the second day after setting out when Edward Waverley
arrived at the village of Tully-Veolan to which he was bound. Never
before had he seen such a place. For, at his uncle's house of
Waverley-Honour, the houses of villagers, all white and neat, stood
about a village green, or lurked ancient and ivy-grown under the shade
of great old park trees. But the turf-roofed hovels of Tully-Veolan,
with their low doors supported on either side by all too intimate piles
of peat and rubbish, appeared to the young Englishman hardly fit for
human beings to live in. Indeed, from the hordes of wretched curs which
barked after the heels of his horse, Edward might have supposed them
meant to serve as kennels--save, that is, for the ragged urchins who
sprawled in the mud of the road and the old women who, distaff in hand,
dashed out to rescue them from being trampled upon by Edward's charger.

Passing gardens as full of nettles as of pot-herbs, and entering between
a couple of gate-posts, each crowned by the image of a rampant bear, the
young soldier at last saw before him, at the end of an avenue, the steep
roofs and crow-stepped gable ends of Bradwardine, half dwelling-house,
half castle. Here Waverley dismounted, and, giving his horse to the
soldier-servant who had accompanied him, he entered a court in which no
sound was to be heard save the plashing of a fountain. He saw the door
of a tall old mansion before him. Going up he raised the knocker, and
instantly the echoes resounded through the empty house. But no one came
to answer. The castle appeared uninhabited, the court a desert. Edward
glanced about him, half expecting to be hailed by some ogre or giant, as
adventurers used to be in the fairy tales he had read in childhood. But
instead he only saw all sorts of bears, big and little, climbing (as it
seemed) on the roof, over the windows, and out upon the ends of the
gables--while over the door at which he had been vainly knocking he read
in antique lettering the mo