t, what some may deem of
perhaps equal authority, a _mythologic_ history also. The inaccessible
chasm, impervious to the sun, and ever resounding the wild howl of the
tortured water, was too remarkable an object to have escaped the notice
of the old imaginative Celts; and they have married it, as was their
wont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itself. And the boulder,
occupying a nearly central position in its course, just where the dell
is deepest, and narrowest, and blackest, and where the stream bellows
far underground in its wildest combination of tones, marks out the spot
where the more extraordinary incidents have happened, and the stranger
sights have been seen. Immediately beside the stone there is what seems
to be the beginning of a path leading down to the water; but it stops
abruptly at a tree,--the last in the descent,--and the green and dewy
rock sinks beyond for more than a hundred feet, perpendicular as a wall.
It was at the abrupt termination of this path that a Highlander once saw
a beautiful child smiling and stretching out its little hand to him, as
it hung half in air by a slender twig. But he well knew that it was no
child, but an evil spirit, and that if he gave it the assistance which
it seemed to crave, he would be pulled headlong into the chasm, and
never heard of more. And the boulder still bears, it is said, on its
side,--though I failed this evening to detect the mark,--the stamp,
strangely impressed, of the household keys of Balconie.[19]

The sun had now got as low upon the hill, and the ravine had grown as
dark, as when, so long before, the lady of Balconie took her last walk
along the sides of the Auldgrande; and I struck up for the little alpine
bridge of a few undressed logs, which has been here thrown across the
chasm, at the height of a hundred and thirty feet over the water. As I
pressed through the thick underwood, I startled a strange-looking
apparition in one of the open spaces beside the gulf, where, as shown by
the profusion of plants of _vaccinium_, the blaeberries had greatly
abounded in their season. It was that of an extremely old woman,
cadaverously pale and miserable looking, with dotage glistening in her
inexpressive, rheum-distilling eyes, and attired in a blue cloak, that
had been homely when at its best, and was now exceedingly tattered. She
had been poking with her crutch among the bushes, as if looking for
berries; but my approach had alarmed her; and she stood m