The bare and scorched wilderness around, over which the eyes of the beadsman and his companion were wandering, as they approached the scene of their conversation, had now resigned its embrowned hue, for the not less dreary and mystic tinge of the blue light of the young moon, as she struggled with the falling darkness. The circumstances of the still unseen chasm being tenanted by the only living mortal within the circumference of the bleak waste, and he himself, calculated, by his unusual formation of body, and imputed mystic powers and attributes, to aid the pregnant associations connected with his lonely condition, was, by those acquainted with the locality of Falconcleugh Muir, naturally combined with the dismal celebrity of the place for these deeds of violence so common at that period in Scotland. Whatever may have been felt by his less imaginative companion, whose familiarity with the overt proceedings of the occult powers of the waste and the ruin may have blunted his perceptions of the supernatural, it is at least certain, and assuredly no marvel either, that Henry Leslie surveyed the scene around him with the feelings natural to the time and the country when and where he lived. The dark figure of the house rose before him, claiming the homage due to the genius of the place, where it was almost the only object that arrested the eye. Replete in itself with the elements of gloomy associations, connected with the fate of the once happy Melvilles who resided there, it threw a wizard power over the surrounding heath-waste, investing the bleak inanity of Nature's most negative condition with an interest which could not have been possessed by her multiform productions. The absence of material objects of thought lent even a species of positive character of inspissated essence to the blue haze of the atmosphere, which seemed to hang like a mighty sea in the deepest stillness of nature's silence. For some time, neither of the parties had uttered a word. The brush of their feet on the heath, and the sound of their breath, were intensified by the silence into noises that to the younger of the two seemed startling and painful. "Hooly, hooly," muttered the beadsman, as his last step brought him to the chasm; "loun and canny, young master--loun and lightly," he added, as he sat down on what seemed to have been a step of a ruined porch, close by the building, and by the brink of the shelving heugh. "Eh! but this silence is gousty and elric. That corbie's grane was like the roar of a lion. Didna ye think the drum o' yer ear would crack wi' the sound?" Henry seated himself by the bluegown on the stone, and they both turned their eyes down on the deep hollow, where the waters seemed as dark as the Stygian stream.