afford a purer supply. It was not by this staircase that our travellers entered the castle, but by a long flight of steps which the last laird had made on the side of the land. They were not guarded by hand-rails. Many years ago a milkmaid coming up them with her pails on a stormy day, was carried over by a high wind, and much hurt. They have given place to the present approach by a carriage-road carried over the chasm which cut off the castle from the neighbouring land.
On the walls of the "stately dining-room" where our travellers
WATERGATE.
were first received, I saw hanging some fine portraits by Raeburn, their host and his wife and their eldest son, a lad with a sweet honest face, who was lost with his ship, the Royal Charlotte, in the Bay of Naples. Near them hang "the wicked laird" and his two wives. There is a tradition that his first wife had fled from him on account of his cruelty, but had been enticed back by a friendly letter. When her husband had caught her, he starved her to death in the dungeon. It was no doubt the sight of these pictures which one day at table led the company to talk of portraits; when Johnson maintained that "their chief excellence is being like. One would like," he added, "to see how Rorie More looked. Truth, Sir, is of the greatest value in these things."
In the same room stands a handsome old sideboard, bearing the date of 1603. Though it goes back to the year of the union of the two Crowns, yet of all the festive gatherings which it has witnessed, perhaps there is none that was more striking than that evening when the Highland gentlemen listened to Johnson's "full strain of eloquence. We were," writes Boswell, "a jovial company
