Fifteen miles south of Aberdeen we came in sight of Dunnottar Castle, lying about two miles from the highway. We left the car by the roadside and followed the footpath through the fields. The ruin stands on a high, precipitous headland projecting far out into the ocean and cut off from the land side by a deep, irregular ravine, and the descent and ascent of the almost perpendicular sides was anything but an easy task. A single winding footpath leads to the grim old gateway, and we rang the bell many times before the custodian admitted us. Inside the gate the steep ascent continues through a rude, tunnellike passageway, its sides for a distance of one hundred feet or more pierced with many an embrasure for archers or musketeers. Emerging from this we came into the castle court, the center of the small plateau on the summit of the rock. Around us rose the broken, straggling walls, bare and bleak, without a shred of ivy or wall-flower to hide their grim nakedness. The place was typical of a rude, semi-barbarous age, an age of rapine, murder and ferocious cruelty, and its story is as terrific as one would anticipate from its forbidding aspect. Here it was the wont of robber barons to retire with their prisoners and loot; and later, on account of the inaccessibility, state and political prisoners were confined here from time to time. In the frightful "Whig's Vault," a semi-subterranean dungeon, one hundred and sixty covenanters--men and women--were for several months confined by orders of the infamous Claverhouse. A single tiny window looking out on the desolate ocean furnished the sole light and air for the great cavern, and the story of the suffering of the captives is too dreadful to tell here. The vault was ankle deep in mire and so crowded were the prisoners that no one could sit without leaning upon another. In desperation and at great risk, a few attempted to escape from the window, whence they clambered down the precipitous rock; but most of them were re-taken, and after frightful tortures were thrown into a second dungeon underneath the first, where light and air were almost wholly excluded. Such was Scotland in the reign of Charles Stuart II, and such a story seemed in keeping with the vast, dismal old fortress. [Illustration: DUNNOTTAR CASTLE, STONEHAVEN, NEAR ABERDEEN.]