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quire the weight of a ship of war's metal from the bay, to level this proud edifice with the dust. The space of ground it covered was immense; for when the spectator stood on the top of the grand dungeon, he might take and view the interior as a fine and nobly spacious amphitheatre, where in days of feudal splendour many a boar's head crowned the loaded board to the Prince and his army; and the moat that surrounded the whole building might have been once the wide and deep reservoir, where lordly swans and hobbling geese revelled in all the profusion and offal from the king's table.

The walls were covered with ivy, and there the merlin and the sparrow, the jack-daw and the marten, held their plumaged court.

"Towers, wood-girt, this castle
Far above the vale,

And clouds of ravens

O'er the turrets sail."

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Indeed the bin-wood, as 'twas called by the schoolboys, spread its creeping, fastening tendrils o'er almost every part of these walls, and on some places gave the huge mass of building the appearance of an immense bush of ivy preserved for future times.

The schoolboys in summers' days plundered the birds' nests among this bin-wood, scrambling along and clinging to the stalks of the ivy, and swung thus perpendicularly on both sides of these walls like so many monkeys. And if the reader add to the depredation of the town-boys, the death-work of the merlin and wild cats by day, and the slaughter of the gray owls by night, he may wonder how the feathered tribe held their Seely Court so long in the castle. What gave the whole a finely picturesque appearance from the bay, was the lofty line of rock, that with bold and storm-defying face de

flected from the bishop's palace. The palace was an old building, some five hundred yards or more from the castle. The rock stretched round the bay, with almost uninterrupted substantiability, in the shape of the outer limb of a new moon or crescent for nearly two miles; and the bases of these rocks, being in many places scooped out into huge dens or caves, with the perpendicularly uprightness of the faces, gave the whole a grandeur befitting the rugged, wild remoteness of such scenes, far above the cit-born jobber's view.

This ancient stately castle, strangely and curiously vaulted underneath the ground, was venerable and romantic from being the seat of glorious deeds of arms in former times, when kings held their court there. It was terrible. in more recent ages, from being the fastness of a very powerful banditti that infested the whole country round,

and the neighbouring isles; but it was more especially terrible from accounts which came down beyond the time of men then living, of the cave-lodged ghosts that were stationed there to guard from molestation the ashes of the dead (for there were a chapel and a burying-ground in this castle), and to teach the sacrilegious and profane that at night the castle was a place of sanctity; and every account of ghosts and hobgoblins haunting the Prince's tower, and never being from the murky vaults below the church-yard and the chapel, was never lessened by the smugglers' friends, but exaggerated by their representations, which, however, were only made to give the greater facilities to this illicit trade. Hence it was that the ingress to these vaults being only known and concealed by the smugglers and their friends, few were acquainted with more than the

King's kitchen, a vault dark, large, and damp. It was this castle the smugglers fixed upon as the abode of Lerwick,

"Where massy stone and iron bar

Were piled on echoing keep and tower,
To whelm the foe with deadly shower."

And we shall, in the sequel, see what success the pursuit of these fear-unknowing men met with in searching and examining the secret and dark, gloomy and wet, lofty and intricate vaults and cells, galleries and passages, of the ruinous castle of Rothsay, for the murderer of the Laird St. Clyde.

Now the smugglers and Levingstone are arrived on the grassy carpet of the great amphitheatre within the castle, and the captain divides his men into three divisions. Two formed the advanced guard, six formed the central division, himself and Levingstone were the rear guard, and the others were

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