We then left the haunted chamber, passed through the dismantled room in which the portraits hung, and ascended the narrow spiral stair--the walls of which, whether from sea damp, or from a peculiarity of the lime used in building, were covered with a glistering scurf of salt--and finally emerged on the battlemented plateau from which the flagstaff sprang. The huge mast had fallen a month or two previously, and was now spliced with rope and propped with billets of wood. A couple of days before the catastrophe, a young fellow from Cambridge, Malcolm told me, had climbed to the top--lucky for the young fellow it did not fall then, else he and Cambridge had parted company for ever. From our airy perch the outlook was wonderfully magnificent. From the breast of the hill which shut out everything in one direction, there rolled down on the castle billow on billow of many-coloured foliage. The garden through which we had passed an hour before was but a speck of bright colour. The little toy village sent up its pillars of smoke. There was the brown stony beach, the boats, the ranges of nets, the sinuous snake-like Loch, and the dark far-stretching promontories asleep on the sleekness of summer sea. With what loveliness of shining blue the sea flowed in everywhere, carrying silence and the foreign-looking bird into inland solitudes, girdling with its glory the rock on which the chief's castle had stood for ten centuries, and at the door of the shepherd's shealing calling on the brown children with the voices of many wavelets, to come down, and play with them on crescents of yellow sand! Driving homeward I inquired, "Does the Laird live here much?" "No, indeed," said Malcolm; "he lives mainly in London." [Sidenote: Dunvegan.]