There is not much to remind one of the fiery parting between Douglas and Marmion so vividly described by Scott. But a mere shell of the castle remains; the draw-bridge of the ringing lines is gone, and the inner walls from which the retainers might have watched the fierce encounter have long since crumbled away. The courtyard where the doughty warriors engaged in their altercation is covered with grasses and starred with wild flowers. About all that remains as it was in the day of Douglas is the dungeon hewn from the solid rock beneath the walls. We wandered about the roofless, dripping ruins as the old keeper told us the story of the castle and pointed out the spots that have been identified with the song of Scott. Here stood the battlements from which the disconsolate Clare contemplated the desolate ocean--here was the chapel where Wilton was armed by old Archibald-- But the rain has ceased and blue rifts are coming in the sky. As we look oceanward, a mountainlike bulk rises dimly out of the dull waters. "Bass Rock," says our guide, "and a peety it is that the sea is too rough for the boots today." A weird island it is, less than a mile in circumference, rising to the stupendous height of four hundred feet, though it little looks it from Tantallon--our guess was less than a quarter as great. In old days the rock was quite inaccessible; it was early fortified and in later times was made a prison. Here was confined a group of the persecuted Covenanters, who lay in the damp, dark dungeons, "envying the freedom of the birds"--the gulls and wild geese that wheel almost in clouds about the rock. Dreadful times these--but to appreciate the real horror of such a fate one would have to stand on Bass Rock when the storm walks abroad and the wild German Ocean wraps the rock in the white mist of the angry waves. The rock serves little purpose now save as a site for a lighthouse, built a few years ago, and as a resort for curious tourists, who can visit it when the weather allows landing to be made. Turning southward through the Lammermuir Hills, we find at the little village of East Linton a surprise in the Black Lion, another of those homelike and wonderfully comfortable Scotch inns which offer genuine cheer to the wayfarer. Here a fire dances in the grate and our luncheon is one that the more pretentious hotels do not equal. We resume our flight under leaden skies through the low gray mists that sweep the hilltops. Haddington is famed for its abbey church, very old and vast in bulk. Jane Welsh Carlyle is buried in its choir--for she chose to lie beside her father in her long sleep.