Sergeant Wemyss posted seven of his musketeers within the barbican, with orders "to keep all in who were within, and all out who were so;" after which he withdrew with the remainder to the spacious and vaulted kitchen, where, as occupying free quarters, they made themselves quite at home, and crowded round the great wood-fire that was roaring in the vast archway which spanned one side of the apartment, joked and toyed with the half-pleased and half-frightened maids, and compelled the indignant housekeeper (who, with Lady Grizel's cast coifs and fardingales assumed many of her airs) to provide them with a substantial supper, the least items of which were a huge side of beef, a string of good fat capons, and an unmeasured quantity of ale and usquebaugh for the soldiers; while his honour the halberdier insisted on wine dashed with brandy, swearing "by the devil's horns," and other cavalier oaths, "he would drink nothing but the best Rhenish." There was an immense consumption of viands, and as the revellers became merrier, they made the whole house ring to their famous camp-song, "Dunbarton's drums beat bonnie, O," to the great envy of those luckless wights in the barbican, who heard only the bleak March wind sighing among the leafless woods, and witnessed through the windows all this hilarity and good cheer from which they were for a time debarred. Mr. Drouthy the butler, and other old servitors, who had seen something of free quarters under the Duke of Hamilton in England, entered heartily into the spirit of entertaining their noisy visitors, to whom they detailed the fields of Inverkeithing, Dunbar, and Kerbeister, with great vociferation, and ever and anon voted the Reverend Mr. Bummel a most unqualified bore, and declared that "the house of Bruntisfield was weel rid of his grunting and skirling about owls and sparrows in the desert." CHAPTER IV. A PAIR OF BLUE EYES. Thou tortur'st me. I hate all obligations Which I can ne'er return--and who art thou, That I should stoop to take them from your hand? FATAL CURIOSITY. The post of honour--that in the hall or lobby immediately outside the room occupied by the ladies--had been appropriated by the serjeant to Walter Fenton. The young man placed his pike across the door of the chamber of dais (as the dining-hall was named in those Scottish houses, which, though to all intents baronial, were not castles) and then paced slowly to and fro.