Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 21, 1896 - Miscellanies, Volume IV

ESSAYS OF THE ROAD, ETC.
another round was proposed, discussed, and negatived
— and they were creaking out of the village with
their carts.
The ruins drew you towards them. You never
saw any place more desolate from a distance, nor one
that less belied its promise near at hand. Some
crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled
in. The snow had drifted into the vaults. The
clachan dabbled with snow, the white hills, the black
sky, the sea marked in the coves with faint circular
wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked from a loop-
hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-
elbows. If you had been a wicked baron and com-
pelled to stay there all the afternoon, you would
have had a rare fit of remorse. How you would
have heaped up the fire and gnawed your fingers !
I think it would have come to homicide before the
evening — if it were only for the pleasure of seeing
something red ! And the masters of Dunure, it is
to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.
One of these vaults where the snow had drifted was
that ' black voute ' where ' Mr. Alane Stewart, Com-
mendatour of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery trials.
On the first and seventh of September 1570 (ill dates
for Mr. Alan !), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain,
his baker, his cook, his pantryman, and another
servant, bound the poor Commendator 'betwix an
iron chimlay and a fire,' and there cruelly roasted him
until he signed away his abbacy. It is one of the
ugliest stories of an ugly period, but not, somehow,
without such a flavour of the ridiculous as makes it
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