into the keep, square,
ponderous, forbidding, cool even on a hot August day, and the best part
left now of the proud old fortress.

Mrs. West had a notebook, a little purple and gold one, like a
doubled-over pansy. As Mr. Douglas (laughing at himself because he was
not experienced as a guide) rattled off all the information he could
remember about Roman foundations--a sack by the Danes; William the
Conqueror, and William Rufus, and a British fort older than the time of
the Romans--she would scribble bits down hastily. But Mr. Norman took no
notes, and when he saw her writing, he looked sad, almost guilty.

"Did you say the round wall the Britons built is under the keep?" she
asked Mr. Douglas, who is, I feel, the kind of young man you would be
calling "Donald" before you knew what you were doing. "Are there only
three fortresses like this in all England? Do tell me what makes this
unique?" And she looked at him so prettily that if I'd been in his place
I'd have run to her like a dog and fawned at her feet. But he never
stirred, and simply answered across the other people, though she is so
much more intelligent than I--I, who couldn't describe properly what is
a bastion.

Our guide lit a candle for the dark dungeons, awful places with grooves
worn in the stone floors by the dragging feet of the prisoners, who
paced rhythmically up and down in the tether of their chains. On the
walls, covered with a cold sweat, as of deathless agony, we could see
the staples; and there was one spot of a dreadful fascination, where
Donald Douglas held his candle to show a trail of slimy moisture. Always
this weeping stone had been there, he said, no one knew why; and in old
days, when these dungeons bore the name of the "black hell," prisoners
tortured with thirst used, animal-like, to lick the oozing patch, making
many hollows round it like miniature glacier mills. After Culloden one
hundred and eighty men were thrown in during one night, and only fifty
were alive in the morning.

It made me feel very loyal to Scotland hearing stories like this--though
I was proud of the Castle too. And I loved the tale of Willie Armstrong,
Kinmont Willie, treacherously given up to Lord Scrope, for the worst
dungeon of all, by troopers who in taking him violated a border truce.
His escape was a real romance; and I am glad Lord Buccleugh, who saved
him, was an ancestor of Sir Walter Scott.

It was no use appealing to Lord Scrope, the Warden of the We