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of a moat which encompassed a baronial castle in the southwest of Scotland. During twelve years this isolated fortress had denied access to every stranger. If travellers by land, or shipwrecked mariners, sought refuge in the hospitality of the chief, they were remanded to a tower, erected on a rocky peninsula, within view of the frowning battlements of the castle, where the Baron had twenty aged, yet robust men, waiting to administer relief; and the applicants were awfully premonished, that if they transgressed a certain boundary, summary execution must be their doom. The Abbot of Unreason could not have obtained an approach so near, unless the lord of the castle had been at St. Columba, paying the last duties to his mother. The inmates had heard much of the Abbot of Unreason, and were delighted at this opportunity of seeing him, and sharing in the diversions created by his blithesome retainers. Above all, they were eager to penetrate the veil of dim futurity, to be drawn aside by the seers of both sexes, who, invested with peculiar insignia, of solemn grandeur, composed the outskirts of this itinerant exhibition. As the Baron could not return from St. Columba in less than seven days, though wind and weather should be propitious, the waiting maidens of the young lady, his daughter, did not despair of eluding the vigilance of seven aged women, and