The sickly rays of a yellow sun shining faintly through the mist after throwing the shadows of the gigantic castle far to the eastward, had died away, and a deeper gloom succeeding, denoted the close of the day as the fall of the fluttering leaves did that of the dreary year. The stranger was Walter Fenton; but how changed in aspect and attire! His form was thin and emaciated, his cheek pale, his eyes sunken from the pain of his wound and the toil of campaigning; but his step was as free, and his bearing erect as ever. His attire was of the plainest grey freize, with great horn buttons; a brown scratch wig and a plain beaver hat concealed the dark locks that curled beneath them; he carried a walking staff in lieu of a sword, and appeared to lean on it a little at times. He was now in the character of a Low Country merchant, and, favoured by a passport from the conservator of Scottish privileges at Campvere, had an hour before landed from the good ship Fame of Queensferry, at the ancient wooden pier of Leith. Often he made brief pauses to view the desolate scene around him; for in that year a heavy curse seemed to have fallen upon the desolate kingdom of Scotland. On an evening in the preceding summer, when everything was blooming and smiling--when the land was rich with verdure and the woods were heavy with foliage, a cold wind came from the eastward, and, accompanied by a dense and sulphureous mist, swept over the face of the country, blighting whatsoever was touched by its pestilential breath. The fields seemed to whiten under its baleful influence; the ripening corn withered, and the land was struck with a barrenness. Dense, opaque, and palpable, like a chain of hills, this strange and horrid vapour lay floating in the valleys for many successive months, and there its effects were more disastrous. The heat of the sun seemed to diminish, the insects disappeared from the air and the birds from the withered woods, which, long ere the last month of summer, became divested of their faded foliage. The cattle became dwarfish and meagre, and the flocks perished by scores on the decaying heather of the blasted mountains. The people became sickly, ghastly, and prostrated in spirit; for a curse seemed to have fallen upon the land and all that was in it. This terrible visitation continued until the year 1701, and the _dear years_ were long remembered with horror in Scotland. In some places, January and February became the months of harvest, and, amid ice and snow, and the sleet that drizzled through that everlasting and sulphureous mist, the half famished people reaped in grief and misery a small part of their scanty produce, while the other was left to rot in the ground. Famine, the lord of all, stalked grimly over the land, and strong men and wailing women, yea, and feeble children, fought like wild beasts for a handful of meal in the desolate market places.