168 SUNDRY ANTIQUITIES. 



the traces of an old doorway, a specimen of very simple 

 and unpretending masonry, being a square hole about 

 four feet high, surmounted by a huge triangular block 

 of stone, resting on side-posts roughly cut from the 

 rock. 



Though the first of the kind I had myself seen, 

 Johnny informed me that there were not less than 

 a score more, in better or worse preservation, within 

 the boundaries of the Laird's domains. At the 

 distance of but a few miles, he said, there were the 

 remains of one situated in the centre of a large loch ; 

 nothing, however, now being left beyond the founda- 

 tions, and those only visible when the water was very 

 low; though tradition averred that the tower had 

 been originally built high and dry on an island, which 

 afterwards, from some mysterious cause, had in one 

 night sunk beneath the surface of the waters, never to 

 emerge again. Another erection of the same kind is 

 still, I believe, standing, though in a very dilapidated 

 state, on a solitary rock somewhere off the western 

 coast. Though the spirit of the storm has for 

 centuries sported around it, though many a thousand 

 times embosomed in the billow's rude embrace, the 

 old tower, venerable in decay, still rears its head above 

 the waters, still flings from its crumbling sides the 

 waves that threaten destruction. 



"Within a couple of miles of the Laird's house, a 

 small stream falls tinkling down the depths of a bosky 

 ravine, on its way from a mountain loch to the blue 

 waters of the ocean below. The wanderer who climbs 

 his way up its rocky channel, will find more than one 

 of those calm retreats, where nature lies sleeping in 

 miniature. 



Above, the birch and the mountain-ash weave their 



