Even the old boatman paused for a moment and looked around him. City, rock, wood, and water, all shone in the magnificent moonlight, but once more the gathering vapours obscured the shining source, and the whole faded like a vision. The varied masses of the city and its stupendous fortress sank again into darkness, and once more the sheet of water rolled to their base a black and foetid lake. At that moment the boat grounded, the passenger sprang ashore, and addressed the boatmen in his usual style:-- "Peril of thy life, knave, tarry till my return, or thy fee will contain more cudgel-blows than bonnet-pieces." "Yes, my Lord, yes," stammered the poor man, whose teeth chattered with cold and fear: meanwhile his imperious employer sprang up the bank, and hurried on, till, reaching the Lang Dykes, a road which led westward, and which he traversed until he gained the Kirk-brae-head, where on one hand the road branched off towards the castle rock, and on the other plunged down between thick copsewood towards the secluded village of the Dean, which lay at the bottom of a deep dell overhung by the richest foliage. By the margin of the Loch, and surrounded by an ample churchyard, where the long grass waved and the yew-trees cast their solemn shadows on many an ancient grave, where the moss-grown headstones, half sunk in earth and obliterated by time, marked the resting-place of the dead of other days, the old cross kirk of St. Cuthbert reared up its dark façade with a gloomy square tower and pointed spire surmounting its nave and transept. There slept all the ancestors of Clermistonlee; he cast but a glance at its vast outline and hurried on. The occasional stars alone gleamed through its mullioned windows, for the tapers of the midnight votary had long since been quenched on the altars of Cuthbert and St. Anne the mother of the Virgin. Under a mouldering gateway, where two stone wyverns with forked tails and outspread wings, reared up on their mossy columns, Clermistonlee paused for a moment--for a host of strange fancies and burning thoughts, the memories of other days, crowded fast upon his mind as he surveyed the long gloomy vista beyond. It led to his mansion of Drumsheugh. The avenue was long and dark; thick oaks and beeches, clothed with the most luxuriant foliage of summer, formed a leafy arcade, which seemed dark and impervious as if hewn through the bowels of a mountain. "Long, long it is," thought he, "since the hoof of the trooper's horse, or the blast of the hunter's horn, the voice of mirth, or the merry voice of a woman awoke these lonely echoes. Alison--Alison--pshaw! I am another man now," he added aloud, and endeavoured to whistle a fashionable couranto, as he walked up the grass-grown avenue, at a pace which soon brought him to the door of the house, where again he made a brief pause.