ersman, who had not
forgotten the order he had received, Mary raised herself on her couch,
and through the window that she had had opened, saw once more the
beloved shore. But at five o'clock in the morning, the wind having
freshened, the vessel rapidly drew farther away, so that soon the land
completely disappeared. Then Mary fell back upon her bed, pale as death,
murmuring yet once again--"Adieu, France! I shall see thee no more."

Indeed, the happiest years of her life had just passed away in this
France that she so much regretted. Born amid the first religious
troubles, near the bedside of her dying father, the cradle mourning was
to stretch for her to the grave, and her stay in France had been a ray
of sunshine in her night. Slandered from her birth, the report was so
generally spread abroad that she was malformed, and that she could not
live to grow up, that one day her mother, Mary of Guise, tired of
these false rumours, undressed her and showed her naked to the English
ambassador, who had come, on the part of Henry VIII, to ask her in
marriage for the Prince of Wales, himself only five years old. Crowned
at nine months by Cardinal Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrews, she was
immediately hidden by her mother, who was afraid of treacherous dealing
in the King of England, in Stirling Castle. Two years later, not finding
even this fortress safe enough, she removed her to an island in the
middle of the Lake of Menteith, where a priory, the only building in the
place, provided an asylum for the royal child and for four young girls
born in the same year as herself, having like her the sweet name which
is an anagram of the word "aimer," and who, quitting her neither in her
good nor in her evil fortune, were called the "Queen's Marys". They were
Mary Livingston, Mary Fleming, Mary Seyton, and Mary Beaton. Mary stayed
in this priory till Parliament, having approved her marriage with the
French dauphin, son of Henry II, she was taken to Dumbarton Castle, to
await the moment of departure. There she was entrusted to M. de Breze,
sent by Henry II to-fetch her. Having set out in the French galleys
anchored at the mouth of the Clyde, Mary, after having been hotly
pursued by the English fleet, entered Brest harbour, 15th August, 1548,
one year after the death of Francis! Besides the queen's four Marys, the
vessels also brought to France three of her natural brothers, among whom
was the Prior of St. Andrews, James Stuart, who was la