old chancel, and sat down where William of
Deloraine and the monk sat, on the Scottish monarch's tomb, and thought
over the words

"Strange sounds along the chancel passed,
And banners wave without a blast;
Still spake the monk when the bell tolled one."

And while we were there the bell tolled twelve.

And then we went to Michael Scott's grave, and we looked through the
east oriel, with its

"Slender shafts of shapely stone,
By foliage tracery combined."

The fanciful outlines showed all the more distinctly for the entire
darkness within, and the gloaming moonlight without. The tall arches
seemed higher in their dimness, and vaster than they did in the daytime.
"Hark!" said I; "what's that?" as we heard a rustling and flutter of
wings in the ivy branches over our heads. Only a couple of rooks, whose
antiquarian slumbers were disturbed by the unwonted noise there at
midnight, and who rose and flew away, rattling down some fragments of
the ruin as they went. It was somewhat odd, but I could not help
fancying, what if these strange, goblin rooks were the spirits of old
monks coming back to nestle and brood among their ancient cloisters!
Rooks are a ghostly sort of bird. I think they were made on purpose to
live in old yew trees and ivy, as much as yew trees and ivy were to grow
round old churches and abbeys. If we once could get inside of a rook's
skull, to find out what he is thinking of, I'll warrant that we should
know a great deal more about these old buildings than we do now. I
should not wonder if there were long traditionary histories handed down
from one generation of rooks to another, and that these are what they
are talking about when we think they are only chattering. I imagine I
see the whole black fraternity the next day, sitting, one on a gargoyle,
one on a buttress, another on a shrine, gossiping over the event of our
nightly visit.

We walked up and down the long aisles, and groped out into the
cloisters; and then I thought, to get the full ghostliness of the
thing, we would go up the old, ruined staircase into the long galleries,
that

"Midway thread the abbey wall."

We got about half way up, when there came into our faces one of those
sudden, passionate puffs of mist and rain which Scotch clouds seem to
have the faculty of getting up at a minute's notice. Whish! came the
wind in our faces, like the rustling of a whole army of spirits down the
staircase; whereat we all tumbled bac