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A thin thread of blue water, laughing, babbling, brawling, whooping, leaping, gliding, and stealing down from the mountains; great boulders worn smooth and ploughed hollow by the wash of ages; wet moss and lichen on the channel walls; deep, cool dubbs; tiny reefs; little cascades of boiling foam; lines of trees like sentinels on either side, making the light dim through the overshadowing leafage; gaunt trunks torn up by winds and thrown across the stream with their heads to the feet of their fellows; the golden fuschia here, the green trammon there; now and again a poor old tholthan, a roofless house, with grass growing on its kitchen floor; and over all the sun peering down with a hundred eyes into the dark and slumberous gloom, and the breeze singing somewhere up in the tree-tops to the voice of the river below.
As ages passed they had simply come to accept it as a matter of course and ceased to question its origin. We passed several islands on which were strangely shaped circular buildings, apparently roofless, and pierced midway between the ground and their tops with small, heavily barred windows.
The flock of crows alighted on a dismal-looking scaffolding, which stood on a hill on this side of the red house. It consisted of roofless columns rising gauntly out of a square mass of masonry and united by four iron bars. From each of these four columns a huge iron hook boldly projected. The crows settled down in thick clusters on the iron bars.
On the landing he found another door beside his own opening on a roofless corridor, and presently he was walking on the top of the ruins.
The Indians, frightened by such a concourse of braves, had fled into the woods, and the roofless poles of their wigwams alone marked the camping-places where but the evening before I had seen the red man monarch of all he surveyed.
In keeping with either mood of nature, the ancient Priory of Tynemouth, standing on the sandstone cliffs on the northern bank of the Tyne, rearing its grey and roofless walls above the harbour mouth, strikes a note that is symbolic of the Northumbria of old and the Northumberland of to-day the note, that is, of the intimate commingling of the romance of the warlike past and the romance of the industrial present.
The cold sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for which they were never made.
The hearth had fallen in, choked by luxuriant greenery; but the blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from the abrupt hill against which it had been placed. Before it foundations could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls survived, roofless and desolate.
Even as he passed, however, the darkness that covered the heavens increased so rapidly that it was with difficulty he could guide his steps. The flower-wreathed columns seemed to reel and tremble; and with every instant he heard the ashes fall cranchingly into the roofless peristyle.
The ghosts of princes and popes are around us, yet the only living inhabitant of the roofless castle is the ragged little goat-herd, whose unsavoury charges are cropping the short grass that covers the site of the banqueting hall, where Norman knights and Italian barons once caroused in the crusading days of long ago.
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