again, and played so beautifully
that the King forgot all about the loss of his favourite horse.

All that day the Harper played to him, and on the morrow, when he would
set out for home, in spite of all his entreaties that he would stay
longer, he made his treasurer give him three times the value of his old
gray mare, in solid gold, because he said that, if his servants had
locked the stable door, the mare would not have been stolen, and,
besides that, he gave him the price of the foal, which the wicked old
man had said that he had lost. "For," said the King, "'tis a pity that
such a marvellous harper should lack the money to pay his rent."

Then the cunning old Harper went home in triumph to Lochmaben, and the
good King never knew till the end of his life how terribly he had been
cheated.

THE LAIRD O' LOGIE

"I will sing if ye will hearken,
If ye will hearken unto me;
The king has ta'en a poor prisoner,
The wanton laird o' young Logie."

It was Twelfth-night, and in the royal Palace of Holyrood a great masked
ball was being held, for the King, James VI., and his young wife, Anne
of Denmark, had been keeping Christmas there, and the old walls rang
with gaiety such as had not been since the ill-fated days of Mary
Stuart.

It was a merry scene; everyone was in fancy dress, and wore a mask, so
that even their dearest friends could not know them, and great was the
merriment caused by the efforts which some of the dancers made to guess
the names of their partners.

One couple in the throng, however, appeared to know and recognise each
other, for, as a tall slim maiden dressed as a nun, who had been dancing
with a stout old monk, passed a young man in the splendid dress of a
French noble, she dropped her handkerchief, and, as the young Frenchman
picked it up and gave it to her, she managed to exchange a whisper with
him, unnoticed by her elderly partner.

Ten minutes later she might have been seen, stealing cautiously down a
dark, narrow flight of stairs, that led to a little postern, which she
opened with a key which she drew from her girdle, and, closing it behind
her, stepped out on the stretch of short green turf, which ran along one
side of the quaint chapel. It was bright moonlight, but she stole behind
one of the buttresses that cast heavy shadows on the grass, and waited.

Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before another figure issued from the
same little postern and joined