Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/116

112 fight. She is described as borne off towards the causeway by the lord of the tower, while the margin of the water is strewed with dead or dying men. She sees her father, her brother, fall in her defence; her lover, to whom she had been betrothed, and from whom she had been torn, die by her side; and the deep and lasting curse which she denounced against her ravisher, and the tower and the lake which gave him shelter is not forgotten; but it is too awful to mingle with the stories of a grave and a devout people. That night, it is said, a voice was heard as of a spirit running round and round the lake, and pronouncing a curse against it; the waters became agitated, and a shriek was heard at midnight. In the morning the castle of the Ladye's Lowe was sunk, and the waters of the lake slept seven fathoms deep over the copestone.

"They who attach credence to this wild legend are willing to support it by much curious testimony. They tell that when the waters are pure in summer-time, or when the winter's ice lies clear beneath the foot of the curler, the walls of the tower are distinctly seen without a stone displaced; while those who connect tales of wonder with every remarkable place say that once a year the castle arises at midnight from the bosom of the lake, with lights—not like the lights of this world—streaming from loophole and turret; while on the summit, like a banner spread, stands a lady clad in white, holding her hands to heaven, and shrieking. This vision is said to precede, by a night or two, the annual destruction of some person by the waters of the lake. The influence, of this superstition has made the Ladye's Lowe a solitary and a desolate place, has preserved its fish, which are both delicious and numerous, from the fisher's net and hook, and its wild swans from the gun of the fowler. The peasantry seldom seek the solitude of its beautiful banks, and avoid bathing in its waters; and when the winter gives its bosom to the curler or the skater, old men look grave and say, 'The Ladye's Lowe will have its yearly victim'; and its yearly victim, tradition tells us, it has ever had since the sinking of the tower.

"I had reached the margin of the lake, and sat looking on its wide pure expanse of water. Here and there the remains of an old tree or a stunted hawthorn broke and beautified the winding line of its border; while cattle, coming to drink and gaze at their shadows, took away from the solitude of