This ancient Castle of Kirkintulloch, which had been stormed by Edward I. of England, but re-taken by the Scots, was a good specimen of the gloomy mansions of the Middle Ages, when every Scotsman was forced to keep watch and ward against his neighbour, and, more than all, against Southern invasion; for it was built by the Comyns, who flourished in the days of Malcolm III., and were Lords of Linton Roderick and of Badenoch, and who made a great figure during the reigns of the three Alexanders and Robert I. In those turbulent times every Scotsman was a soldier, and a brave one, too; every house was a fortress, every fortress a citadel, and its inmates were a garrison, while the urgent necessity for security caused the Scottish baron literally to found his dwelling on a rock. A site alike remote and inaccessible was usually selected, on the isle of some deep lake, or the brow of a sequestered hill, and there the Scottish feudatory raised the mansion in which his race were to dwell, to be married and given in marriage, to be born and to die, "while grass grew and water ran"--the strong square peel-house, with its corbelled battlements, through the openings of which missiles could be shot securely; its stone-flagged roof; its irregular slits or windows, all strongly grated, though ninety or a hundred feet from the base, and girdled by a barbican, having an arched gate and flanking towers. Such was unvaryingly the external aspect of the dwelling of a Scottish baron, and such was the Castle of Kirkintulloch. Above the gate, which bristled with loopholes for musketry, were the armorial bearings of Robert Comyn, who was slain at the battle of Alnwick, and the monogram of his descendant, the black Lord of Badenoch, who married the Princess Marjorie, daughter of King John Baliol, and whose son was the last of his race. After taking a draught from the cup of ale which was filled for him, as for all other visitors, from a barrel which stood in a recess of the entrance lobby, the captain ascended the hollow-stepped stair to the common hall of the venerable tower.