. of England, and she died a hundred years before the
Anne I mean,--the last of the Stuarts, you know. My Anne came after
William and Mary, and before the Georges."

"Which William and Mary?"

"What Georges?"

But this was too much even for Salemina's equanimity, and she retired
behind her book in dignified displeasure, while Francesca and I meekly
looked up the Annes in a genealogical table, and tried to decide whether
'b.1665' meant born or beheaded.

Chapter II. Edina, Scotia's Darling Seat.

The weather that greeted us on our unheralded arrival in Scotland was of
the precise sort offered by Edinburgh to her unfortunate queen, when,

'After a youth by woes o'ercast,
After a thousand sorrows past,
The lovely Mary once again
Set foot upon her native plain.'

John Knox records of those memorable days: 'The very face of heaven did
manifestlie speak what comfort was brought to this country with hir--to
wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety--for in the memorie of man
never was seen a more dolorous face of the heavens than was seen at
her arryvall... the myst was so thick that skairse micht onie man espy
another; and the sun was not seyn to shyne two days befoir nor two days
after.'

We could not see Edina's famous palaces and towers because of the haar,
that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping fog or mist which the east wind
summons from the sea; but we knew that they were there, shrouded in the
heart of that opaque, mysterious greyness, and that before many hours
our eyes would feast upon their beauty.

Perhaps it was the weather, but I could think of nothing but poor Queen
Mary! She had drifted into my imagination with the haar, so that I could
fancy her homesick gaze across the water as she murmured, 'Adieu, ma
chere France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!'--could fancy her saying as
in Allan Cunningham's verse:--

'The sun rises bright in France,
And fair sets he;
But he hath tint the blithe blink he had
In my ain countree.'

And then I recalled Mary's first good-night in Edinburgh: that 'serenade
of 500 rascals with vile fiddles and rebecks'; that singing, 'in bad
accord,' of Protestant psalms by the wet crowd beneath the palace
windows, while the fires on Arthur's Seat shot flickering gleams of
welcome through the dreary fog. What a lullaby for poor Mary, half
Frenchwoman and all Papist!

It is but just to remember the 'indefatigable and undissuadable' John