sparkling granite town of Dalbeattie (a miniature
Aberdeen, Sir S. called it) instead of going straight on toward
Kirkcudbright we turned westward to see the great stronghold of the
Black Douglases. It was no more than seven easy miles to Castle Douglas,
a little modern town all laid out in rectangles. Sailing straight
through, we came out on the edge of Carlingwark Loch, which rings a few
green islets with silver; and taking a side road we were close to the
river Dee. There, on a cushion of an island, only big enough to hold it,
rose the great ruin of Thrieve Castle, the home of the proud and
magnificent Douglases. Once boats must have carried the knights and
ladies back and forth between the mainland and the fourteenth-century
fastness of old Archibald the Grim. But now I saw a line of
half-submerged stepping-stones, the only way of crossing in these days
when there is no fighting or feasting at Thrieve, and no "tassel"
dangling from the knoblike "hanging stone" over the great gate.

"Workers of high-handed outrage!
Making King and people grieve,
O the lawless Lords of Galloway!
O the bloody towers of Thrieve!"

Sir S. quoted as we stared up at the giant keep, seventy feet high, with
its tremendous walls. "They were a terrible power in the land, that
family, at their greatest, when they lorded it over Galloway and
Annandale, and owned Touraine and Longueville in France, and used to
ride out with a retinue of a thousand picked horsemen."

"That nice soldier yesterday--Mr. Douglas at Carlisle--thinks they were
a _charming_ family," said I. "He has an old proverb something like
this:

"So many, so good as of Douglases have been
Of one surname in Scotland never yet was seen."

and he told me a great deal about the Douglas Heart."

"He would!" mumbled Sir S. "There were good hearts and bad hearts among
them, but all were great hearts in the old days; anyhow, I'm not
surprised that Crockett got inspiration from this place when he used to
play here, coming over from Castle Douglas, where he was at school. He
must have had his head buzzing with story plots when he'd climbed up
inside the walls and crawled out to sit astride of the hanging stone.
I'll warrant he saw Maclellan beheaded in the courtyard while Sir
Patrick Gray, the King's messenger, supped with Douglas; and heard Mons
Meg fire off the first granite cannon-ball, that shot away the hand of
the Countess as she held a wine-glass up