rs overgrown with weeds, and
the fruit-trees cut down or grubbed up. In one compartment of this
old-fashioned garden were two immense horse-chestnut trees, of whose
size the Baron was particularly vain: too lazy, perhaps, to cut them
down, the spoilers, with malevolent ingenuity, had mined them, and
placed a quantity of gunpowder in the cavity. One had been shivered
to pieces by the explosion, and the fragments lay scattered around,
encumbering the ground it had so long shadowed. The other mine had been
more partial in its effect. About one-fourth of the trunk of the tree
was torn from the mass, which, mutilated and defaced on the one side,
still spread on the other its ample and undiminished boughs. [A pair of
chestnut trees, destroyed, the one entirely, and the other in part, by
such a mischievous and wanton act of revenge, grew at Invergarry Castle,
the fastness of Macdonald of Glengarry.]

Amid these general marks of ravage, there were some which more
particularly addressed the feelings of Waverley. Viewing the front of
the building, thus wasted and defaced, his eyes naturally sought the
little balcony which more properly belonged to Rose's apartment--her
TROISIEME, or rather CINQUIEME ETAGE. It was easily discovered, for
beneath it lay the stage-flowers and shrubs with which it was her pride
to decorate it, and which had been hurled from the bartizan: several of
her books were mingled with broken flower-pots and other remnants. Among
these, Waverley distinguished one of his own, a small copy of Ariosto,
and gathered it as a treasure, though wasted by the wind and rain.

While, plunged in the sad reflections which the scene excited, he
was looking around for some one who might explain the fate of the
inhabitants, he heard a voice from the interior of the building singing,
in well-remembered accents, an old Scottish song:

They came upon us in the night,
And brake my bower and slew my knight:
My servants a' for life did flee,
And left us in extremitie,

They slew my knight, to me sae dear;
They slew my knight, and drave his gear;
The moon may set, the sun may rise,
But a deadly sleep has closed his eyes.
[The first three couplets are from an old ballad, called the
Border Widow's Lament.]

'Alas!' thought Edward, 'is it thou? Poor helpless being, art thou alone
left, to gibber and moan, and fill with thy wild and unconnected scraps
of minstrelsy the halls that