have sneered at anaesthetics, Henry would have
softly administered curare [Note 4], and afterwards made a charming
speech on the platform concerning the sacrifices of their own feelings,
which physiologists are sorrowfully compelled to make for the benefit of
humanity and the exigencies of science.

Thirteen years after the marriage of Margaret of Scotland, when he was a
young man of six-and-twenty, Henry the Third made a second attempt to
win a Scottish queen. The fair Princess Marjory had now joined her
sisters in England; and in point of age she was more suitable than
Margaret. The English nobles, however, were very indignant that their
King should think of espousing a younger sister of the wife of so mere
an upstart as Hubert de Burgh. They grumbled bitterly, and the Count of
Bretagne, brother-in-law of the murdered Arthur and the disinherited
Alianora, took upon himself to dissuade the King from his purpose.

This Count of Bretagne is known as Pierre Mauclerc, or Bad-Clerk: not a
flattering epithet, but historians assure us that Pierre only too
thoroughly deserved the adjective, whatever his writing may have done.
He had, four years before, refused his own daughter to King Henry,
preferring to marry her to a son of the King of France. The Count had
undertaken no difficult task, for an easier could not be than to
persuade or dissuade Henry the Third in respect of any mortal thing. He
passed his life in acting on the advice in turn of every person who had
last spoken to him. So he gave up Marjory of Scotland.

Three years more had elapsed since that time, during which Marjory, very
sore at her rejection, had withdrawn to the Court of King Alexander her
brother. In the spring of 1234 she returned to her eldest sister, who
generally resided either in her husband's Town-house at Whitehall,--it
was probably near Scotland Yard--or at the Castle of Bury Saint
Edmund's. She was just then at the latter. Earl Hubert himself was but
rarely at home in either place, being constantly occupied elsewhere by
official duties, and not unfrequently, through some adverse turn of King
Henry's capricious favour, detained somewhere in prison.

"And how long hast thou nestled in this sweet new bower, my bird?" said
Marjory caressingly to her niece.

"To-day, Aunt Marjory! It is a birthday present from my Lord and
father. Is it not pretty? Only look at the walls, and the windows, and
my beautiful velvet settle. Now, did you