About ten years after, a middle-aged Highlander, the servant of a maiden lady who resided near the Auldgrande, was engaged one day in fishing in the river, a little below where it issues from the chasm. He was a shrewd fellow, brave as a lion and kindly-natured withal, but not more than sufficiently honest; and his mistress, a stingy old woman, trusted him only when she could not help it. He was more than usually successful this day in his fishing; and picking out some of the best of the fish for his aged mother, who lived in the neighbourhood, he hid them under a bush, and then set out for his mistress with the rest. “Are you quite sure, Donald,” inquired the old lady as she turned over the contents of his basket, “that this is the whole of your fishing?--where have you hid the rest?” “Not one more, lady, could I find in the burn.” “O Donald!” said the lady. “No, lady,” reiterated Donald, “devil a one!” And then, when the lady’s back was turned, off he went to the bush to bring away the fish appropriated to his mother. But the whole had disappeared; and a faintly marked track, spangled with scales, remained to show that they had been dragged apparently by some animal along the grass in the direction of the chasm. The track went winding over grass and stone along the edge of the stream, and struck off, as the banks contracted and became more steep and precipitous, by a beaten path which ran along the edge of the crags at nearly the level of the water, and which, strangely enough, Donald had never seen before. He pursued it, however, with the resolution of tracing the animal to its den. The channel narrowed as he proceeded; the stream which, as he entered the chasm, was eddying beneath him in rings of a mossy brown, became one milky strip of white, and, in the language of the poet, “boiled, and wheeled, and foamed, and thundered through;” the precipices on either hand, beetled in some places so high over his head as to shut out the sky, while in others, where they receded, he could barely catch a glimpse of it through a thick screen of leaves and bushes, whose boughs meeting midway, seemed twisted together like pieces of basket work. From the more than twilight gloom of the place, the track he pursued seemed almost lost, and he was quite on the eve of giving up the pursuit, when, turning an abrupt angle of the rock, he found the path terminate in an immense cavern. As he entered, two gigantic dogs, which had been sleeping one on each side of the opening, rose lazily from their beds, and yawning as they turned up their slow heavy eyes to his face, they laid themselves down again. A little further on there was a chair and table of iron apparently much corroded by the damps of the cavern. Donald’s fish, and a large mass of leaven prepared for baking, lay on the table; in the chair sat the lady of Balconie.