The house of Birkwoodbrae was a little two-storied villa, with pretty oriel windows, about which the monthly roses, clematis, and Virginia creeper clambered: and it had been engrafted by the colonel on an old farmhouse, the abode of his ancestors, which had two crow-stepped gables and a huge square ingle-lum--the later being now the ample kitchen fireplace of the new residence, and in the remote quarter of the little household. A lintel over the door that now led to the barnyard told the date of this portion of the mansion, as it bore the legend often repeated by Mary:-- 'BLISSIT BE GOD FOR AL HIS GIFTIS. R. W. 1642,' and showed that it had outlived the wars of the Covenant and the strife that ended at Killiecrankie; and by its wall there grew a hoary pear-tree, called a longovil--the name of a kind of pear introduced into Scotland by Queen Mary of Guise, the Duchess of Longueville. This part of the house was, or used to be haunted by a goblin known as 'the Darien Ghost,' a spectre that used to appear during the blustering winds of March, on the anniversary of the storming and sack of Fort St. Andrew by the Spaniards, when a thousand Scotsmen perished, among them, Ronald, the Laird or Gudeman of Birkwoodbrae. This ghost was a heavily-booted one, with spurs that were heard to jingle as it went; and it was wont to appear by the bedside of some sleeping visitor, over whom it would bend with pallid face and gleaming eyes; and those who had found courage enough to strike at the figure with hand or sword, found, to their dismay, that notwithstanding his heavy-heeled boots, by some idiosyncrasy, peculiar perhaps to ghosts, the stroke passed unimpeded _through it_; but Mary averred that since the railway had come through Strathearn, less and less had been seen of the Darien spectre, and now it came no more. Around the house were groups of lovely silver birches, the 'siller birks' that gave the place its name; in front the ground sloped gently downward, till the little garden, with its well-kept plots and parterres of flowers, ended in a park of emerald green grass, where the spotlessly white sheep and brindled cattle grazed amid the sweetest sylvan scenery, the vivid colours of which were now brought forth by the fleecy whiteness of the clouds, the deep blue of the sky, and the brilliance of the sunshine; and, as William Black has it, 'I have heard Mr. Millais declare that three hours' sunshine in Scotland is worth three months of it at Cairo.'