She was twenty-eight at the
time of her marriage.

The Fergusons are a much older family, as families are reckoned, than
the Lauries. Fergusons of Craigdarrock were attached to the courts of
William the Lion and Alexander the II. (1214-1249).

Craigdarrock House stands near the foot of one of the three glens
whose waters unite to form the Cairn. The hills draw together here,
and give an air of seclusion to the house and grounds. The house,
large and substantial, lacks the picturesqueness of Maxwelton. It is
pale pink in tone with window-casings and copings of French gray. The
delicate cotoneaster vine clings to the stones of it. There are pretty
reaches of lawns and abundant shrubberies, and in one place
Craigdarrock Water has been diverted to form a lake, spanned in one
part by a high bridge. Sheep feed upon the hills topped with green
pastures, at the south, and shaggy Highland cattle in the meadows
below. A heavy wood overhangs to the north. There is plenty of fine
timber on the grounds, beeches, and great silver firs and, especially
to be named, ancient larches with knees and elbows like old oaks,
given to the proprietor by George II., when the larch was first
introduced into Scotland.

The present proprietor of Craigdarrock is Captain Robert Ferguson, of
the fourth generation in direct descent from Annie Laurie.

Religion has always been a burning question in Scotland, and about
Annie's time the flames raged with peculiar ferocity. Her father, Sir
Robert Laurie, was a bitter enemy of the Covenantry, and his name
finds a somewhat unenviable fame in mortuary verses of this sort cut
upon gravestones:

"Douglas of Stenhouse, _Laurie of Maxwelton_,
Caused Count Baillie give me martyrdom."

But the Fergusons were staunch Covenanters, and Annie, if we may judge
from her marriage with one of that party, must have favored
"compromise." Without doubt she must have worshipped with her husband
in the old parish kirk, which was burned about fifty years since. The
two end gables, ivy-shrouded, are still standing.

Against the east gable is the burial-ground of the Lauries, and
against the west that of the Fergusons. A ponderous monument marks the
grave of Annie's grandfather, cut with those hideous emblems which
former generations seemed to delight in. But the burial-place of the
Fergusons is singularly lacking in early monuments, and no stone marks
the place of Annie's rest. It is a sweet, secluded spot, and
Cock-