The place had been shut up for nearly two years; and so foul had the stagnant atmosphere become, that the candle which we brought with us to explore burned dim and yellow like a miner's lamp. The floors, broken up in fifty different places, were littered with rotten straw; and in one of the corners there lay a damp heap, gathered up like the lair of some wild beast, on which some one seemed to have slept, mayhap months before. The partitions were crazed and tottering; the walls blackened with smoke; broad patches of plaster had fallen from the ceilings, or still dangled from them, suspended by single hairs; and the bars of the grates, crusted with rust, had become red as foxtails. Mr. M'Craw nodded his head over the gathered heap of straw. "Ah," he said--"got in again, I see! The shutters must be looked to." "I daresay," I remarked, looking disconsolately around me, "you don't find it very easy to get tenants for houses of this kind." "_Very_ easy!" said Mr. M'Craw, with somewhat of a Highland twang, and, as I thought, with also a good deal of Highland _hauteur_--as was of course quite natural in so shrewd and extensive a house-agent, when dealing with the owner of a domicile that would not let, and who made foolish remarks--"No, nor easy at all, or it would not be locked up in this way: but if we took off the shutters you would soon get tenants enough." "Oh, I suppose so; and I daresay it is as difficult to sell as to let such houses." "Ay, and more," said Mr. M'Craw: "it's all sellers, and no buyers, when we get this low." "But do you not think," I perseveringly asked, "that some kind, charitable person might be found in the neighbourhood disposed to take it off my hands as a free gift! It's terrible to be married for life to a baggage of a house like this, and made liable, like other husbands, for all its debts. Is there no way of getting a divorce?" "Don't know," he emphatically replied, with somewhat of a nasal snort; and so we parted; and I saw or heard no more of Peter M'Craw until many years after, when I found him celebrated in the well-known song by poor Gilfillan.[7] And in the society of my friend I soon forgot my miserable house, and all the liabilities which it entailed.