When you entered the door, you passed through an outer hall into the courtyard, round which the house was built. The flagstones which paved it were green and damp-stained; but a little path of well-worn bricks, with a wooden roof supported on pillars (to shield one from the weather), led straight across to the low, matted hall, with its further door opening on the sea-view, and its framed diagrams of yacht-flags and signals, which recalled the days of the _Lufra_ and the _Flower o' Yarrow_. A door to the right led to the great staircase, which was bordered by the most beautiful iron trellis-work, hammered into flowers and arabesques, that it was ever my good fortune to see. Up-stairs, owing to the house being only one room thick, and being built in a complete square round the courtyard, all the rooms opened into one another, though by an ingenious arrangement of staircases it was possible to get to each suite separately. Heude, a pupil of Verrio, had painted the ceilings, and though the "Diana and Endymion" in the smaller drawing-room was perhaps the more exquisitely lovely, it was hard to decide between it and the "Aurora" in the larger room. What a beautiful room that great drawing-room was, as I remember it! with its panelled walls painted white, hung with portraits of the exiled Stuart kings, and over the chimney-piece and above the doors landscapes in grisaille let into the walls. There were a good many of these in the house. They were principally foreign scenes, but there was a curious view of Edinburgh, painted before the North Loch was drained and while the New Town was still unthought of, which is now preserved at Dalkeith. When my aunt, Lady John Scott, lived here, a curious circumstance sometimes occurred in this room. The first time she remembered its happening, she was sitting alone about eleven o'clock one evening. Suddenly the window at the end of the room, close to the door opening into the dining-room, was violently burst open, and a cannon-ball (apparently) bounded in, falling heavily on the floor and rolling forwards. It rebounded three times, and seemed to come as far as the screen half-way up the room, and stop there. My aunt rang violently, but when the servants came nothing could be seen, the window was shut and uninjured, and everything as usual. Every effort was made to find out what had caused this noise, but in vain; and as there were no rooms above this part of the house, it was the more unaccountable. I remember, in January 1879, when we, as children, were spending a fortnight there alone with our German governess, that she heard the same sound one evening, and was so terrified, that she would never sit alone in that room at night again. This time the cannon-ball seemed to roll right up to where she was sitting by the fire. The two maid-servants who were always left in the house constantly heard it, but got used to it, and did not mind. Nothing was ever seen, and it could never be accounted for in any way.