a more terrible price is exacted for every precious endowment. Her
rank and reign only made her powerless to do good, and exposed her to
danger. Her talents only served to irritate her foes and disappoint her
friends. This most charming of women was the destruction of her lovers.
Married three times, she had never any happiness as a wife, but in both
the connections of her choice found that she had either never possessed
or could not retain, even for a few weeks, the love of the men she had
chosen.... A mother twice, and of a son and daughter, both the children
were brought forth in loneliness and sorrow, and separated from her
early, her son educated to hate her, her daughter at once immured in a
convent. Add the eighteen years of her imprisonment, and the fact that
this foolish, prodigal world, when there was in it one woman fitted by
her grace and loveliness to charm all eyes and enliven all fancies,
suffered her to be shut up to water with her tears her dull embroidery
during the full rose-blossom of her life, and you will hardly get beyond
this story for a tragedy, not noble, but pallid and forlorn."

From Edinburgh Margaret and her party made an excursion into the
Highlands. The stage-coach was not yet displaced by the locomotive, and
Margaret enjoyed, from the top, the varying aspect of that picturesque
region. Perth, Loch Leven, and Loch Katrine were visited, and
Rowardennan, the place from which the ascent of Ben Lomond is usually
made by travellers. Margaret attempted this feat with but one companion,
and without a guide, the people at the inn not having warned her of any
danger in so doing.

The ascent she found delightful. So magnificent was the prospect, that,
in remembering it, she said: "Had that been, as afterwards seemed
likely, the last act of my life, there could not have been a finer
decoration painted on the curtain which was to drop upon it."

The proverbial _facilis descensus_ did not here hold good, and the
_revocare gradum_ nearly cost Margaret her life. Beginning to descend at
four in the afternoon, the indistinct path was soon lost. Margaret's
companion left her for a moment in search of it, and could not find her.

"Soon he called to me that he had found it [the path], and I followed in
the direction where he seemed to be. But I mistook, overshot it, and saw
him no more. In about ten minutes I became alarmed, and called him many
times. It seems he, on his side, did the same, but the brow of