t_. Here you find on landing huge Spanish
chestnuts, one lying dead, others standing stark and peeled, like
gigantic antlers, and others flourishing in their _viridis senectus_,
and in a thicket of wood you see the remains of a monastery of great
beauty, the design and workmanship exquisite. You wander through the
ruins, overgrown with ferns and Spanish filberts, and old fruit-trees,
and at the corner of the old monkish garden you come upon one of the
strangest and most touching sights you ever saw--an oval space of about
18 feet by 12, with the remains of a double row of boxwood all round,
the plants of box being about fourteen feet high, and eight or nine
inches in diameter, healthy, but plainly of great age.

What is this? it is called in the guide-books Queen Mary's Bower; but
besides its being plainly not in the least a bower, what could the
little Queen, then five years old, and "fancy free," do with a bower? It
is plainly, as was, we believe, first suggested by our keen-sighted and
diagnostic Professor of Clinical Surgery,[7] _the Child-Queen's Garden_,
with her little walk, and its rows of boxwood, left to themselves for
three hundred years. Yes, without doubt, "here is that first garden of
her simpleness." Fancy the little, lovely royal child, with her four
Marys, her playfellows, her child maids of honor, with their little
hands and feet, and their innocent and happy eyes, pattering about that
garden all that time ago, laughing, and running, and gardening as only
children do and can. As is well known, Mary was placed by her mother in
this Isle of Rest before sailing from the Clyde for France. There is
something "that tirls the heartstrings a' to the life" in standing and
looking on this unmistakable living relic of that strange and pathetic
old time. Were we Mr. Tennyson, we would write an Idyll of that child
Queen, in that garden of hers, eating her bread and honey--getting her
teaching from the holy men, the monks of old, and running off in wild
mirth to her garden and her flowers, all unconscious of the black,
lowering thunder-cloud on Ben Lomond's shoulder.

[7] The same seeing eye and understanding mind, when they were
eighteen years of age, discovered and published the Solvent
of Caoutchouc, for which a patent was taken out afterwards
by the famous Mackintosh. If the young discoverer had
secured the patent, he might have made a fortune as large as
his present