After viewing the castle from various points, we boldly advanced across the bridge and rang the bell. After waiting some little time, we were admitted by a man who--the family at the time being from home--seemed the only person in possession. He was extremely polite, volunteered to show us all over the place, and regretted that in the prolonged absence of his master the carpets and furniture in the "drawing-room" had been lifted. The familiar English _patois_ sounded strange in the castle of a Macleod! On his invitation we entered an unfurnished hall with galleries running to left and right, and on the wooden balustrades of one of these galleries the great banner of Macleod was dispread--a huge white sheet on which the arms and legend of the house were worked in crimson. Going up stairs, we passed through spacious suites of rooms, carpetless, and with the furniture piled up in the centre and covered with an awning--through every window obtaining a glimpse of blue Loch and wild Skye headland. In most cases in the rooms the family pictures were left hanging, some fine, others sorry daubs enough, yet all interesting as suggesting the unbroken flow of generations. Here was Rory More, who was knighted in the reign of James VI. Here was the Macdonald lady, whose marriage with the Macleod of that day was the occasion of the arms of the families being united on the sculptured stone which we saw built above the door of the barn outside. Here was a haughty-looking young man of twenty-five, and yonder the same man at sixty, grim, wrinkled, suspicious-looking--resembling the earlier portrait only in the pride of eye and lip. Here were Macleod beauties who married and became mothers in other houses; yonder were beauties from other castles who became mothers here, and grew gray-haired and died, leaving a reminiscence of their features in the family for a generation or two. Here was the wicked Macleod, yonder the spendthrift in whose hands the family wealth melted, and over there the brave soldier standing with outstretched arm, elephants and Indian temples forming an appropriate background. The rooms were spacious, every window affording a glorious sea view; but from their unfurnished and dismantled condition there arose a sort of Ossianic desolation, which comfortless as it must have been to a permanent dweller, did not fail to yield a certain gloomy pleasure to the imagination of the visitor of an hour. [Sidenote: The Macleod dungeons.]