in the
language of the district, which was apt occasionally to be strong and
graphic rather than elegant,--people remarked that "old Ormiston
had cut up well." Five thousand charms added to those Bessie already
possessed--not to mention that her father was a rich man--made her
most miraculously charming: like Tibby Fowler of the Glen, whose
perplexities of this kind have been embalmed in song, she had wealth
of wooers, and wealth, it is well known, makes wit waver.

It is a saying that an Englishman's house is his castle, but the
phrase is understood to be figurative: Mr. Ormiston's house was his
castle without a figure. Cockhoolet Castle is very old, at least one
part of it is, having been built probably about the year 1400. A more
modern part was built in 1527, while the most modern part of all was
added in 1726: this last division of it is used as the farm-house.
The rooms have been painted and papered in the present style of house
decoration, and in the sitting-rooms, in addition to the little old
windows, the thick walls have been pierced and a large bow-window put
in with fine effect. There are three narrow stone staircases leading
up the three divisions of the castle; there are long passages; there
are sudden short flights of steps taking you up or down into all
manner of cornered rooms; there is a hall which might hold the
population of the county. Keeping up one of the spiral staircases,
you come out on the roof, round which there is a walk guarded by a low
stone coping: should you want to fling yourself over, you have ample
opportunity. There are stone sentry-boxes where you can sit hidden
from the wind and everything else, and look far and wide over the
country, and down into the garden if you can do so without growing
giddy. There is also a dungeon tenanted by nothing more subject
to suffering than potatoes and other roots, for which it is a most
favorable receptable, the walls being so thick and the roof so low
that cold cannot get in in winter nor heat in summer: there is only a
single narrow slit in the wall for the admission of light, but it is
comforting to know that the doomed wretches who inhabited it in past
ages had at least a temperate climate.

There is the room Queen Mary Stuart slept in when she occasionally
visited in the vicinity. The reader is perhaps not familiar with Queen
Mary's name in connection with Cockhoolet Castle, but there may be
other facts about her of which he is also ignoran