Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/305

 Rh ray of light entered save by the open door. In the rocky floor there is a shallow well, which in the driest seasons is always full of water. The arched roof is built of huge boulders gathered from the beach, the spaces between being filled up with thin layers of stone after the fashion of Roman masonry. A dark staircase in the thickness of the wall leads up through another strong door to a second vaulted chamber, dimly lighted by narrow slits at the end of two slanting recesses, on each side of which are stone benches. This I was told was the court-room or judgment-hall. Opening out of it on one side is a very small chamber, in which was a kind of cupboard, a hiding-place perhaps for title-deeds and plate, for it could be so closed with stones as to look like solid wall. On the other side is the door to the dungeon, dismal enough, but not so dismal as the pit below, with its well in which women could be put to death with decency. On either side of the mouth of the well is a narrow ledge some eighteen inches wide, but not long enough to allow the prisoner to stretch himself at full length. On the floor above the court-room was the kitchen, with walls more than seven feet thick. It occupied the whole of the story. On the freestone joints of the great hearth can be seen the deep marks made by sharpening knives. Above the kitchen was the family sitting-room, which was entered from a gallery running all round it outside, and built in the overhanging part of the tower. Here at length I arrived at what may be called the front door. There was some attempt at ornament in the carving on the stones at the top and each side of the doorway. There was, moreover, light enough to see it clearly, for the gallery can boast of fair-sized windows. From one of them the laird could look out on the Hangman's Hill, about a third of a mile off, now covered with fir-trees, but then bare. Some stones remain, in which the gallows were set up. The view from the castle, except when a hanging was going on, must on a fine day have been always beautiful, even when the country was bare of trees. To the north and east they looked over fields, once yellow every autumn with grain, but now pleasant meadow-land, shut in with hills and mountains down whose sides in rainy weather rivers stream and cascades leap. From one corner of the gallery a turret projects with two narrow windows, where the watchman could see anyone approaching from the side of the land. Not far from it was "the whispering hole," where, by removing a stone which exactly fits into an opening, a