The house which Mr. Charles Heriot had taken in St. Andrews was one of the oldest in that old town. The rooms were somewhat low and the windows small, and its aspect outside was, perhaps, just a little prison-like and closed up. You entered by a little door in the wall, which seemed made for clandestine stealing out and in, for ladies veiled and muffled, and gallant gentlemen disguised in the cloaks of romance. This small and jealous entrance, however, admitted the visitor into an old court all bowery on one side with jasmine and roses, and affording on the other a pleasant peep of a velvet lawn and old-fashioned garden. The third side of the square was filled up by the old house itself, upon which the sculptured arms of an old Fife family shone, over the door. This door was approached by high outside steps, under the shade of which appeared a lower door, which showed a red-tiled passage traversing the house, and another gleam of light and garden greenness at the other end. The sitting-rooms of the house were thus raised to a considerable height, and looked out from their small and deep-set windows on the ruins of the Cathedral and the blue sea beyond. Never were ruins more complete in their sunny annihilation of the past than the ruins of St. Andrews. They have a sort of typical character for the students of Scottish history. Here the noble, rich, and splendid Middle Ages, which have conferred upon other nations their finest monuments and recollections, lie buried, as it were, in utter effacement, not scorned any longer--on the contrary, reverently preserved and taken care of--but blotted out from all possibility of use, and even from all meaning. But yet there is one monument of the past which still stands fast and sure as ever, the old homely, inarticulate tower of St. Regulus, belonging to a past which has no voice, a dark world which leaves everything to the fancy, and which has stood there through all changes for centuries, appealing by very absence of suggestiveness to that profound imagination which lies at the bottom of the Scottish character. The graceful clustered piers, the lovely decorated windows, the lordly breadth and majesty of aisle and nave, are too suggestive for that reticent and deep-seated faculty; but against the mysterious simplicity of that tower, which discloses nothing, no sacrilegious hand has ever been raised. It stands there in primitive gravity, plainness, lack of grace, as it might have stood in those days when the “pure Culdee, was Albyn’s earliest priest of God;” flattering the mind of the nation with a subtle sense of its antiquity, consistency, unity in all ages. These reflections, however, are ours, and not those of Marjory Hay-Heriot, as she stood at the narrow window of her new dwelling-place, and looked out upon the same sea which washed her native headland. Her eye sought that first, as is natural to the eyes of those who have been born upon its margin. Over the old ruins