xchanged laughing remarks about our having found the forest primeval;
before long each was plentifully adorned with scratches and tears. All
around us the silence was intense; there was no singing of birds nor
humming of insects in that wood. But more than once we came across
bones--the whitened skeletons of animals that had sought these shades
and died there or had been dragged into them and torn to pieces by
their fellow beasts. Altogether there was an atmosphere of eeriness
and gloom in that wood, and I began--more for my companion's sake than
my own--to long for a glimpse of some outlet, a sight of the sunlit
sea beyond, and for the murmur of the burn which I felt sure, ran
rippling coast-wards beneath the fringes of this almost impassable
thicket.

And then at the end of quite half-an-hour's struggling, borne, I must
say, by Miss Raven, with the truly sporting spirit which was a part of
her general character, a sudden exclamation from her, as she pushed
her way through a clump of wilding a little in advance of me, caused
me to look ahead.

"There's some building just in front of us!" she said. "See--grey
stones--a ruin!"

I looked in the direction she indicated, and through the interstices
of the thickly-leaved branches, just then prodigal of their first
spring foliage, saw, as she said, a grey wall, venerable and
time-stained, rising in front. I could see the topmost stones, a sort
of broken parapet, ivy clustering about it, and beneath the green of
the ivy, a fragment of some ornamentation and the cavernous gloom of a
window place from which glass and tracery had long since gone.

"That's something to make for, anyway," I said. "Some old tower or
other. Yet I don't remember anything of the sort, marked on the maps."

We pushed forward, and came out on a little clearing. Immediately in
front of us stood the masonry of which we had caught glimpses; a low,
squat, square tower, some forty feet in height, ruinous as to the most
part, but having the side facing us nearly perfect and still boasting
a fine old doorway which I set down as of Norman architecture. North
of this lay a mass of fallen masonry, a long line of grass-grown,
weed-encumbered stone, which was evidently the ruin of a wall; here
and there in the clearing were similar smaller masses. Rank weed,
bramblebush, beds of nettles, encumbered the whole place; it was a
scene of ruin and desolation. But a mere glance was sufficient to show
me that we had c