is time,
for the ratio of forgetting, increases."

"I should like much to hear it!" said Donal.

"Do tell him, Hector," said Miss Graeme, "and I will watch his hair."

"It is the hair of those who mock at such things you should watch,"
returned Donal. "Their imagination is so rarely excited that, when it
is, it affects their nerves more than the belief of others affects
theirs."

"Now I have you!" cried Miss Graeme. "There you confess yourself a
believer!"

"I fear you have come to too general a conclusion. Because I believe
the Bible, do I believe everything that comes from the pulpit? Some
tales I should reject with a contempt that would satisfy even Miss
Graeme; of others I should say--'These seem as if they might be true;'
and of still others, 'These ought to be true, I think.'--But do tell me
the story."

"It is not," replied Mr. Graeme, "a very peculiar one--certainly not
peculiar to our castle, though unique in some of its details; a similar
legend belongs to several houses in Scotland, and is to be found, I
fancy, in other countries as well. There is one not far from here,
around whose dark basements--or hoary battlements--who shall say
which?--floats a similar tale. It is of a hidden room, whose position
or entrance nobody knows. Whether it belongs to our castle by right I
cannot tell."

"A species of report," said Donal, "very likely to arise by a kind of
cryptogamic generation! The common people, accustomed to the narrowest
dwellings, gazing on the huge proportions of the place, and upon
occasion admitted, and walking through a succession of rooms and
passages, to them as intricate and confused as a rabbit-warren, must be
very ready, I should think, to imagine the existence within such a
pile, of places unknown even to the inhabitants of it themselves!--But
I beg your pardon: do tell us the story."

"Mr. Grant," said Kate, "you perplex me! I begin to doubt if you have
any principles. One moment you take one side and the next the other!"

"No, no; I but love my own side too well to let any traitors into its
ranks: I would have nothing to do with lies."

"They are all lies together!"

"Then I want to hear this one," said Donal.

"I daresay you have heard it before!" remarked Mr. Graeme, and began.

"It was in the earldom of a certain recklessly wicked wretch, who not
only robbed his poor neighbours, and even killed them when they opposed
him, but went so far as to behave as wickedly on