As Hugh John admitted, this was "something like!" The Abbey precincts were instantly filled with the mingled sounds characteristic of all well-conducted forays, and it was well indeed that the place was wholly deserted. For the lowings of the driven cattle, the shouts of the triumphant Highlanders, the deep rage of the Baron, stalking to and fro wrapped in his cloak on the Castle terrace, might well have astonished the crowd which in these summer days comes from the four corners of the world "to view fair Melrose aright." It was not till the edge had worn off their first enthusiasm, that it became possible to collect them again in order to read "The Hold of a Highland Robber," which makes Chapter Seventeenth of _Waverley_ itself. And the reading so fired the enthusiasm of Sweetheart that she asked for the book to take to bed with her. The boys were more practical, though equally enthusiastic. "Wait till we get home," cried Hugh John, cracking his fingers and thumbs. "I know a proper place for Donald Bean Lean's cave." "And I," said Sir Toady Lion, "will light a fire by the pond and toss the embers into the water. It will be jolly to hear 'em hiss, I tell you!" "But what," asked Maid Margaret, "shall we do for the cattle and sheep that were hanging by the heels, when Edward went into Donald Bean Lean's cave?" "Why, we will hang _you_ up by the heels and cut slices off you!" said Sir Toady, with frowning truculence. Whereat the little girl, a little solemnised, began to edge away from the dangerous neighbourhood of such a pair of young cannibals. Sweetheart reproached her brothers for inventing calumnies against their countrymen. "Even the Highlanders were never so wicked," she objected; "they did not eat one another." "Well, anyway," retorted Sir Toady Lion, unabashed, "Sawney Bean did. Perhaps he was a cousin of Donald's, though in the history it says that he came from East Lothian." "Yes," cried Hugh John, "and in an old book written in Latin it says (father read it to us) that one of his little girls was too young to be executed with the rest on the sands of Leith. So the King sent her to be brought up by kind people, where she was brought up without knowing anything of her father, the cannibal, and her mother, the cannibaless--" "Oh," cried Sweetheart, who knew what was coming, putting up her hands over her ears, "please don't tell that dreadful story all over again." "Father read it out of a book--so there!" cried Sir Toady, implacably, "go on, Hugh John!" "And so when this girl was about as big as Sweetheart, and, of course, could not remember her grandfather's nice cave or the larder where the arms and legs were hung up to dry in the smoke--"