At another time, and many months later, I am walking under a wood of Scottish firs. It is near nightfall, and the fir tops are swaying, and sighing hoarsely, in the cool wind of the Northern Highlands. There is none of the smiling landscape of England about me; and the crags of Edinburgh and Castle Stirling, and sweet Perth, in its silver valley, are far to the southward. The larches of Athol and Bruar Water, and that highland gem—Dunkeld, are passed. I am tired with a morning’s tramp over Culloden Moor; and from the edge of the wood there stretches before me, in the cool gray twilight, broad fields of heather. In the middle, there rise against the night-sky, the turrets of a castle; it is Castle Cawdor, where King Duncan was murdered by Macbeth. The sight of it lends a spur to my weary step; and emerging from the wood, I bound over the springy heather. In an hour, I clamber a broken wall, and come under the frowning shadows of the castle. The ivy clambers up here and there, and shakes its uncropped branches, and its dried berries over the heavy portal. I cross the moat, and my step makes the chains of the drawbridge rattle. All is kept in the old state; only in lieu of the warder’s horn, I pull at the warder’s bell. The echoes ring, and die in the stone courts; but there is no one astir, nor is there a light at any of the castle windows. I ring again, and the echoes come, and blend with the rising night wind that sighs around the turrets, as they sighed that night of murder. I fancy—it must be a fancy—that I hear an owl scream; I am sure that I hear the crickets cry. I sit down upon the green bank of the moat; a little dark water lies in the bottom. The walls rise from it gray and stern in the deepening shadows. I hum chance passages of Macbeth, listening for the echoes—echoes from the wall; and echoes from that far-away time, when I stole the first reading of the tragic story. “Did’st thou not hear a noise? I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry. Did you not speak? When? Now. As I descended? Ay. ——Hark!” And the sharp echo comes back—“Hark!” And at dead of night, in the thatched cottage under the castle walls, where a dark-faced, Gaelic woman, in plaid turban, is my hostess, I wake, startled by the wind, and my trembling lips say involuntarily—“hark!”