portions of its towers, of which originally there were but three. The roof and the floors are gone. The courtyard is turfed, and over the surface within its enclosure the grass grows thick and green, while weeds and wild-flowers fringe its slowly mouldering walls, upon which indeed several small trees have rooted themselves, in crevices stuffed with earth. One superb ivy-tree, of great age and size, covers much of the venerable ruin, upon its inner surface, with a wild luxuriance of brilliant foliage. There are the usual indications in the masonry, showing how the area of this castle was once subdivided into rooms of various shapes and sizes, some of them large, in which were ample fireplaces and deeply recessed embrasures, and no doubt arched casements opening on the inner court. Here dwelt the early kings of Scotland. Here the national story of Scotland began. Here for a long time was treasured the Stone of Destiny, Lia Fail, before it was taken to Scone Abbey, thence to be borne to London by Edward the First, in 1296, and placed where it has ever since remained, and is visible now, in the old coronation chair in the chapel of Edward the Confessor, at Westminster. Here through the slow-moving centuries many a story of love, ambition, sorrow, and death has had its course and left its record. Here, in the stormy romantic period that followed 1745, was imprisoned for a while the beautiful, intrepid, constant, and noble Flora Macdonald, who had saved the person and the life of the fugitive Pretender, after the fatal defeat and hideous carnage of Culloden. What pageants, what festivals, what glories, and what horrors have those old walls beheld! Their stones seem agonised with ghastly memories and weary with the intolerable burden of hopeless age; and as I stood and pondered amid their gray decrepitude and arid desolation,--while the light grew dim and the evening wind sighed in the ivy and shook the tremulous wall-flowers and the rustling grass,--the ancient, worn-out pile seemed to have a voice, and to plead for the merciful death that should put an end to its long, consuming misery and dumb decay. Often before, when standing alone among ruins, have I felt this spirit of supplication, and seen this strange, beseechful look, in the silent, patient stones: never before had it appealed to my heart with such eloquence and such pathos. Truly nature passes through all the experience and all the moods of man, even as man passes through all the experience and all the moods of nature. [Illustration: _Dunstaffnage._]