of Orleans. The people of Scotland wished her to return to her
native land. Both the great parties sent embassadors to her to ask
her to return, each of them urging her to adopt such measures on her
arrival in Scotland as should favor their cause. Queen Catharine,
too, who was still jealous of Mary's influence, and of the admiration
and love which her beauty and the loveliness of her character
inspired, intimated to her that perhaps it would be better for her
now to leave France and return to her own land.

Mary was very unwilling to go. She loved France. She knew very little
of Scotland. She was very young when she left it, and the few
recollections which she had of the country were confined to the
lonely island of Inchmahome and the Castle of Stirling. Scotland was
in a cold and inhospitable climate, accessible only through stormy
and dangerous seas, and it seemed to her that going there was going
into exile. Besides, she dreaded to undertake personally to
administer a government whose cares and anxieties had been so great
as to carry her mother to the grave.

Mary, however, found that it was in vain for her to resist the
influences which pressed upon her the necessity of returning to her
native land. She wandered about during the spring and summer after
her husband's death, spending her time in various palaces and abbeys,
and at length she began to prepare for her return to Scotland. The
same gentleness and loveliness of character which she had exhibited
in her prosperous fortunes, shone still more conspicuously now in her
hours of sorrow. Sometimes she appeared in public, in certain
ceremonies of state. She was then dressed in mourning--in
white--according to the custom in royal families in those days, her
dark hair covered by a delicate crape veil. Her beauty, softened and
chastened by her sorrows, made a strong impression upon all who saw
her.

She appeared so frequently, and attracted so much attention in her
white mourning, that she began to be known among the people as the
White Queen. Every body wanted to see her. They admired her beauty;
they were impressed with the romantic interest of her history; they
pitied her sorrows. She mourned her husband's death with deep and
unaffected grief. She invented a device and motto for a seal,
appropriate to the occasion: it was a figure of the liquorice-tree,
every part of which is useless except the root, which, of course,
lies beneath the surface of the earth. Unde