He listened with dark and sullen brow to ebullitions which he considered justly as equally evanescent with the crimson bubbles on the brink of the goblet, or at least with the vapours which its contents excited in the brains of the revellers around him.
When the last flask was emptied, they took their leave with deep protestations--to be forgotten on the morrow, if, indeed, those who made them should not think it necessary for their safety to make a more solemn retractation.
Accepting their adieus with an air of contempt which he could scarce conceal, Ravenswood at length beheld his ruinous habitation cleared of their confluence of riotous guests, and returned to the deserted hall, which now appeared doubly lonely from the cessation of that clamour to which it had so lately echoed.

But its space was peopled by phantoms which the imagination of the young heir conjured up before him--the tarnished honour and degraded fortunes of his house, the destruction of his own hopes, and the triumph of that family by whom they had been ruined.

To a mind naturally of a gloomy cast here was ample room for meditation, and the musings of young Ravenswood were deep and unwitnessed.
The peasant who shows the ruins of the tower, which still crown the beetling cliff and behold the war of the waves, though no mroe tenanted saved by the sea-mew and cormorant, even yet affirms that on this fatal night the Master of Ravenswood, by the bitter exclamations of his despair, evoked some evil fiend, under whose malignant influence the future tissue of incidents was woven.

Alas! what fiend can suggest more desperate counsels than those adopted under the guidance of our own violent and unresisted passions?
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