Near the castle, and forming indeed a portion of it, was a platform, facing the little sandy bay, where the fishing boats were beached, and thereon were mounted twelve iron twenty-four pounders, part of the spoil of _La Bonne Citoyenne_, a French privateer, which was cast away on the Parian Craig; and there, as the old lord and representative peer (whose wife is awaiting him) still retained his military instincts, being a retired general officer, he had all the able-bodied men of his tenantry drilled to the use of sponge and rammer as artillerymen, for rumours of invasion were rife; gunboats were being built at Boulogne, and those who then looked across the Straits of Dover, could see the white tents of the Armée d'Angleterre, under the Irish soldier of fortune, Kilmaine, covering all the hostile shore of France. So all Britain was bristling with bayonets; from Cape Wrath to the Land's End in Cornwall, every man who could handle a musket was a volunteer, if not otherwise enrolled in the line, militia, or Fencibles. On this battery the flag was hoisted and a salute loyally and joyously fired every 4th of June, in honour of His Majesty George III., by the Rohallion volunteers; and there with loud hurrahs they drank confusion to France and to his enemies, Tom Paine, the Pope, and the Devil, and very frequently in the best French brandy, which somehow found its way quite as often as our good Farintosh or Campbelton whisky, duty free, into the sea coves beneath the castle rock. These twelve twenty-four pounders protected the approach to the bay on one side, and to the gate of the castle on the other--the haunted gate of Rohallion, as it was named, from the circumstance that there the old village dominie, Symon Skaill, when going home one morning (night he affirmed it to be) in midsummer, after topering with Mr. John Girvan, saw a very startling sight. Clearly defined in the calm still twilight of the morning, there stood by the gate the tall and handsome figure of John, Master of Rohallion, who was known to be then serving with the Foot Guards under Cornwallis, in America. He wore his scarlet regimentals, his brigadier wig, his long straight sword, and little three-cocked hat; but his face was pale, distorted by agony, and blood was flowing from a wound in his left temple. Ere the affrighted dominie could speak, the figure--the _wraith_--melted into the twilight, and not a trace of it remained by the arched gate, where the birds were twittering about in the early morning. A note was made of this singular vision, and it was found that at that hour, the Master of Rohallion had been shot through the head, when leading on his company of the Guards at the attack on Long Island. Such, in 1798, was the old Scottish mansion of Rohallion, the residence of Reynold, sixth Lord of that ilk, which, by the events of the last night's storm, has become the starting-place, or, as the quartermaster might phrase it, the _point d'appui_, of our story.