^eptemtiet 



XXXI 



You may throw open your bedroom window, and if you 

 A Scottish are so material as to indulge in a morning 

 Blood-feud gyp q£ ^ga,, you can fling the biscuit which 

 accompanies it two hundred feet down into the blue 

 sea, for it flows round three sides of the rock on which 

 this fairy castle stands. It is a modem one, having been 

 built some hundred and twenty years ago by one Adam 

 of whom we wot, whose genius, it must be confessed, lay 

 rather in classical or Palladian piles than in this mimic 

 Gothic. Yet is Culzean Castle an impressive mass of 

 masonry, in spite of the many large rectangular windows, 

 and has been invested with a military character by a 

 former Lord of Ailsa, who, impressed with the imminence 

 of foreign invasion, set about creating bastions and earth- 

 works on a formidable scale. The entrance-hall reminds 

 one of the armoury of the Tower of London ; a thousand 

 stand of arms, of an archaic type it is true, but carefully 

 oiled and burnished, garnish its walls; brass carronades 

 defend the circular staircase, and outside, on the terraces, 

 pieces of heavier calibre grin defiance across the Firth. 

 It is said that the designer of these defences, the first 

 Marquess, took grave umbrage at a relative in the Navy 

 who offered to wager that he would capture the castle on 



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