About the tower cling irregular offshoots, added by many Lairds of Mossgray since peace became paramount on the Border; in which, it is impossible to deny, my good ancestors have studied convenience more than elegance. Yet the group of buildings high and low, angled and rounded, with the dark and rugged tower rising in the midst, have a charm upon them, greater, as I think, than the fascination of regular beauty. Patches of moss and yellow lichen are on the walls and roof--the grey, thick walls, and sombre slated roof, which look themselves like some natural growth of the earth, firmly rooted in kindly soil. Our doors are many now, and broad and easy of access--for the successive Graemes, who have increased the accommodations of Mossgray, have added entrance to entrance, with a prodigality by no means pleasant when those searching winds are abroad; but we still preserve the harsh and lowering portal, and the heavy iron door, which of old frowned upon unwelcome southern visitors in sullen defiance. I confess that I have a pleasure in looking upon these--it pleases me to trace historic changes in the aspect of my patrimonial house; that this belongs of natural right to the rugged and sturdy times of Border warfare--that from that gloomy turret with its spiral stair, the golden shield of Scotland was gloomily taken down by one who had fought in her cause, when Mary crossed the Firth on her last fatal journey to trust the false courtesies of England. That in this dark chamber, a godly Lady Mossgray sheltered the persecuted hinds and shepherds, whose faith has added them to the ranks of our truest chivalry in Scotland. That this enlarged and decorated hall in the basement of the tower bears witness to the peace of the third William’s reign. That these gradually accumulating walls carry on the chronicle through the less eventful times of modern history--that here we have been dwelling, through all vicissitudes prosperous and adverse, in our own land and among our own people for five hundred certain years. There remembrances I acknowledge are dear to me. I lose my own individuality when I leave Mossgray. And in a vague mist of dreamy romance and childish reverie, these histories hung incumbent on my mind when my dim days began. They lived with me, a host of mingled times and shapes, more real, as I fancy yet, than the common every-day things I saw around. The chill of cold-heartedness, the absence of truth, strike with a strange, blank, unexpressed pain, upon the heart of a child--and from these I turned to dwell, where warriors and Border maidens had dwelt before me, among the true knights and fair ladies of a yearning fancy, whose indefinite pageants and minstrelsies had yet more truth of nature in them than the hollow external forms of the life that men called real.-- “Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized,”