has been kept the further
indictments will show.'

'I deemed it was St. Andrew,' faltered the prisoner.

'And therefore that the oath to a heavenly saint would better bear
breaking than one to an earthly sinner,' replied James gravely. 'Read
on, Clerk of the Court.'

The roll continued--a long and terrible record of violence and cruelty;
the private warfare of the lawless young prince, the crimes of reckless
barbarity and of savage passion--a deadly roll, in which indeed even the
second abduction of Lilias was one of the least acts laid to his charge.

No lack of witnesses were there to prove deeds that had been done in the
open face of day, in utter fearlessness of earthly justice, and defiance
of Heaven. The defence that the prisoner seemed to have been prepared to
us?--that those who sat to judge him had shared in his offences, and his
daring power of brow-beating them, as he had so often done before, as son
of the man who sat in the King's seat--had utterly failed him now. He
was mute; and the forms of the trial were gone through as of one whose
doom was already sealed, but who must receive his sentence according to
the strictest form of law, lest the just reward of his deeds should
partake of their own violence. By the end of the day the jurors had
found Walter Stewart guilty; and the doomster, a black-robed clerk,
rising up, pronounced the sentence that condemned Walter Stewart of
Albany to suffer death by beheading.

Even then no one believed that the doom would be inflicted. Royal blood
had never flowed beneath the headsman's axe; and it would have been
infinitely more congenial to Scottish feelings if the King had sent a
party of men-at-arms to fall on the Master in the high road, and cut him
off, or had burnt him alive in his castle. The verdict 'served him
right' would have been universally returned, and rejoiced in; but a
regular trial of a man of such birth was unheard of, and shocking to the
feelings even of those whom that irresistible force of the King's had
compelled to sit in judgment upon him. No one could avow it face to face
with the King; but every one felt it an outrage to find that no rank was
exempt from law.

Duke Murdoch, his son Alexander, and his father-in-law Lennox, were tried
the next day, and many a deed of dark treason was laid to their charge.
The Earl of Lennox had been the scourge of Scotland for more than half
the eighty years of his life, but his extreme age might have