"We might have cabled 'coffee and the nearest approach to cold grouse.' Do you like cold grouse for breakfast, Gavin? There's nothing to beat it on the list, to my way of thinking. Cold grouse and nice, crisp, hot toast. Some Cambridge squash afterwards, and then a great big round pipe. That's what you think of when you've been ten hours in the saddle and can't find an inn. I wish I could discern it now, as the curate says." Gavin smiled, but his gaze was set upon the ancient ruin his quick eye had observed upon a height of the green mountain above them. He wondered if the path would carry them by it, or pierce the hills and leave the castle, for such it plainly had been, upon their left hands. But for the circumstances in which he approached it, the scene had been wild and strange enough to have awakened all an artist's dormant capacities for admiration. They were well above the pine woods by this time and could look back upon a fertile valley, exquisitely green, and bordered by shining rivers. Villages, churches, farms were so many dolls' houses planted upon mighty fields while midget beasts awakened to the day. The bridle-track itself wound about a considerable mountain whose slopes were glorious with heather and mountain ash; there were other peaks beyond, rising in a crescendo of grandeur to the distant vista of the eternal snows, where the gods of solitude had been enthroned and melancholy uplifted an icy sceptre. Gavin could not but be sensible of the majesty of this scene; nor did he find the old castle out of harmony with its beauties. The building, which he now perceived that they were approaching, had been built in a cleft of the hills, at a point where the torrent fell in a thunder of silver spray to a deep blue pool far down in the valley below. Clinging, as it were, to the very face of a precipitous cliff, a drawbridge spanned the torrent and gave access to the mountain road upon the further side of the pass; but so narrow was the river and so perpendicular the rocks that it seemed as though men might clasp hands across the abyss or a good horse take it in the stride of a gallop. For the rest, the black frowning walls, the iron-sheathed doors, the pint-houses, the barbicon, the quaint turrets thrust out here and there above the chasm, spoke of many centuries and many arts--here of Saracen, there of Turk, of the reign of the rounded arch, and even of glorious Gothic. A building to study, Gavin said, to scan with well-schooled eyes from some opposing height, whence every phase of its changing wonders might be justly estimated by him who would learn and imitate. Even his own predicament was forgotten when his guides stopped upon its threshold and demanded in loud tones that the drawbridge should be let down. "This is the place, by Mahomet," said Arthur dryly ... and he added, "What a devil of a house for a week-end!" Gavin bade him listen. A voice across the chasm replied to the gypsy hail.