"And with that he cracked his whip and drove out of sight. I was left alone on the doorstep of the old House of Craignesslin. I looked up at the small windows set deep in the walls. Above one of them I made out the date 1658, and over the door were carven the letters W.F.
"Then I minded the tales my father used to tell in the winter forenights, of Wicked Wat Fergus of Craignesslin, how he used to rise from his bed and blow his horn and ride off to the Whig-hunting with Lag and Heughan, how he kept a tally on his bed-post of the men he had slain on the moors, making a bigger notch all the way round for such as were preachers.
"And while I was thinking all this, I stood knocking for admission. I could not hear a living thing move about the place. The bell would not ring. At the first touch the brass pull came away in my hands, and hung by the wire almost to the ground.
"Yet there was something pleasant about the place too, and if it had not been for the uncanny silence, I would have liked it well enough. The hills ran steeply up on both sides, brown with heather on the dryer knolls, and the bogs yellow and green with bracken and moss. The sheep wandered everywhere, creeping white against the hill-breast or standing black against the skyline. The whaups cried far and near. Snipe whinnied up in the lift. Magpies shot from thorn-bush to thorn-bush, and in the rose-bush by the door-cheek a goldfinch had built her nest.
"Still no one answered my knocking, and at last I opened the door and went in. The door closed of its own accord behind me, and I found myself in a great hall with tapestries all round, dim and rough, the bright colours tarnished with age and damp. There were suits of armour on the wall, old leathern coats, broad-swords basket-hiked and tasselled, not made into trophies, but depending from nails as if they might be needed the next moment. Two ancient saddles hung on huge pins, one on either side of the antique eight-day clock, which ticked on and on with a solemn sound in that still place.
"I did not see a single thing of modern sort anywhere except an empty tin which had held McDowall's Sheep Dip.
"Nance, you cannot think how that simple thing reassured me. I opened the door again and pulled my box within. Then I turned into the first room on the right. I could see the doors of several other rooms, but they were all dark and looked cavernous and threatening as the mouths of cannon.
"But the room to the right was bright and filled with the sunshine from end to end, though the furniture was old, the huge chairs uncovered and polished only by use, and the great oak table in the centre hacked and chipped. From the window I could see an oblong of hillside with sheep coming and going upon it. I opened the lattice and looked out. There came from somewhere far underneath, the scent of bees and honeycombs. I began to grow lonesome and eerie. Yet somehow I dared not for the life of me explore further.
"It was a strange feeling to have in the daytime, and you know, Nance, I used to go up to the muir or down past the kirkyaird at any hour of the night.
"I did not take off my things. I did not sit down, though there were many chairs, all of plain oak, massive and ancient, standing about at all sorts of angles. One had been overturned by the great empty fireplace, and a man's worn riding-glove lay beside it.