s a shed, deprived of all
external appearance of sanctity, and employed for vulgar uses for many
centuries, which has been at length discovered by its construction, the
small dark chancel arch and rude ornament, to have been a chapel, and
which there seems no doubt is at least built upon the site consecrated
for Margaret's oratory, if not the very building itself. It is small
enough and primitive enough, with its little line of toothed ornament,
and its minute windows sending in a subdued light even in the very flush
of day, to be of any antiquity. I believe that even the fortunate
antiquary who had the happiness of discovering it does not claim for
this little chapel the distinction of being the very building itself
which Margaret erected. Yet it must have been one very similar,
identical in form and ornament, so that the interested spectator may
well permit himself to picture the sick and anxious Queen, worn out with
illness and weighed down by sore forebodings, kneeling there in the
faint light before the shadowed altar, trying to derive such comfort as
was possible from the ministrations of the priests, and following with
her prayers her husband and her boys, so young still and not hardened to
war, who might be falling by the hands perhaps of her own kindred, in
the country which was hers, yet which she scarcely knew. In the
intervals of these anxious prayers, when her failing strength permitted,
how wistfully the Queen and her ladies must have gazed from the walls
far around on every side to watch for the first appearance of any
messenger or herald of return. From the woods of Dunfermline and its
soft rural landscape, and the new abbey with its sweet singing and all
its magnificence, it must have been a change indeed to dwell imprisoned
so near the sky, within the low, stern rugged walls of the primitive
fort, with a few rude houses clinging about it, and the little chapel on
the rock, small and dark, as the only representative of the stately
arches and ornate services which she loved. But the little chapel is
deeply involved in all the later history of Margaret's life.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF QUEEN MARGARET'S CHAPEL, EDINBURGH CASTLE]

One day her attendants remarked that she was even more sad than her
wont, and questioning her received a reply which must have made them
tremble. "Perhaps to-day," she said, "a great evil has fallen upon the
Scots, such as has not happened to them for years." Her hearers, howeve