Roland had heard but a part of their frightful conversation; it was beyond the power of human endurance to listen to all those wretches said. He rushed into the farthest corner of his apartment, covered his ears with his hands, and wept and groaned aloud in the utter impotency of his rage and grief. But how much wilder would that rage and grief have been, had he known that they were all gone to visit his hapless mistress, for the double purpose of performing some of those additional tortures to which those accused of sorcery were usually subjected, by order of the supreme tribunal in Scotland, and at the same time to accomplish another cruel plan of Sir Adam Otterburn's device. CHAPTER XLV. THE BOON. "Now is't a deed of mercy brings thee here,-- Of mercy to a suffering fellow man, Or is't his rank that summons all thy pity, And lends thy tongue its load of eloquence?"--_Old Play_. On leaving King David's Tower, Father St. Bernard passed through the Spur, by the Castle Port, and descended the Castlehill-street into the city. The bells tolled the hour of nine in the Maison Dieu, at the head of Bell's Wynd, as he passed it, and he saw the lights gleaming in the chapel of this edifice, which stood on the south side of the High-street. The vast height of its buildings cast a dusky shade over this thoroughfare; and the steep narrow closes which diverged on each side from it were almost buried in obscurity. In each of the small round archways, which gave admittance to these deep and ghostly alleys, when the night advanced an oil lamp was lighted, a remarkable improvement at this early period, when neither London nor Paris could boast of such an advance in civilization, for which our citizens were solely indebted to their good King James V. Finding that Edinburgh was becoming a place of resort from all parts of the kingdom, in 1532, the monarch so far influenced the town Council, that the High-street was well paved with large stones, quarried among the craigs of Salisbury. Many of the more ancient tenements were removed, renovated, or made more ornamental; while, as before stated, the citizens had to hang out lanterns to light the narrow thoroughfares; but as these were made of horn and were fed with oil, they shed but a dim and wavering radiance on the enormous stone bastilles and overhanging Flemish fronts, which are still the leading features of the old grey city of the Stuarts and Alexanders.