A most melancholy dwelling! Dwelling indeed no more but for the hoodie-crow, and for the fawn of the hill that years after I saw treading over the grass-grown lintel of its door. To-night the place was full of empty airs and ghosts of sounds inexplicable, wailing among the cabars that jutted black and scarred mid-way from wall to wall The byre was in a huddle of damp thatch, and strewn (as God’s my judge) by the bones of the cattle the enemy had refused to drive before them in the sauciness of their glut A desolate garden slept about the place, with bush and tree--once tended by a family of girls, left orphan and desolate for evermore. We went about on tiptoes as it might be in a house of the dead, and peeped in at the windows at where had been chambers lit by the cheerful cruisie or dancing with peat-fire flame--only the dark was there, horrible with the odours of char, or the black joist against the dun sky. And then we went to the front door (for Tombreck was a gentle-house), and found it still on the hinges, but hanging half back to give view to the gloomy interior. It was a spectacle to chill the heart, a house burned in hatred, the hearth of many songs and the chambers of love, merrymaking, death, and the children’s feet, robbed of every interest but its ghosts and the memories of them they came to. “It were useless to look here; she is not here,” I said in a whisper to my comrade. He stood with his bonnet in his hand, dumb for a space, then speaking with a choked utterance. “Our homes, our homes, Colin!” he cried. “Have I not had the happy nights in those same walls, those harmless hospitable halls, those dead halls?” And he looked broadcast over the country-side. “The curse of Conan and the black stones on the hands that wrought this work!” he said. “Poison to their wells; may the brutes die far afield!” The man was in a tumult of grief and passion, the tears, I knew by his voice, welling to his eyes. And indeed I was not happy myself, had not been happy indeed, by this black home, even if the girl I loved was waiting me at the turn of the road. “Let us be going,” I said at last. “She might be here; she might be in the little plantation!” he said (and still in the melancholy and quiet of the place we talked in whispers). “Could you not give a call, a signal?” he asked; and I had mind of the call I had once taught her, the doleful pipe of the curlew. I gave it with hesitancy to the listening night. It came back an echo from the hills, but brought no other answer. A wild bird roosting somewhere in the ruined house flapped out by the door and over us. I am not a believer in the ghostly--at least to the extent of some of our people; yet I was alarmed, till my reason came to me and the badinage of the professors at college, who had twitted me on my fears of the mischancy. But M’Iver clutched me by the shoulder in a frenzy of terror. I could hear his teeth chittering as if he had come out of the sea.