ncesca, was the wife of James VI.
of Scotland, who was James I. of England, and she died a hundred years
before the Anne I mean,--the last of the Stuarts, you know. My Anne
came after William and Mary, and before the Georges."

"Which William and Mary?"

"What Georges?"

But this was too much even for Salemina's equanimity, and she retired
behind her book in dignified displeasure, while Francesca and I meekly
looked up the Annes in a genealogical table, and tried to decide
whether "b. 1665" meant born or beheaded.

II

The weather that greeted us on our unheralded arrival in Scotland was
of the precise sort offered by Edinburgh to her unfortunate queen,
when,

"After a youth by woes o'ercast,
After a thousand sorrows past,
The lovely Mary once again
Set foot upon her native plain."

John Knox records of those memorable days: "The very face of heaven
did manifestlie speak what comfort was brought to this country with
hir--to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety--for in the
memorie of man never was seen a more dolorous face of the heavens than
was at her arryvall ... the myst was so thick that skairse micht onie
man espy another; and the sun was not seyn to shyne two days befoir
nor two days after."

We could not see Edina's famous palaces and towers because of the
_haar_, that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping fog or mist which the
east wind summons from the sea; but we knew that they were there,
shrouded in the heart of that opaque mysterious grayness, and that
before many hours our eyes would feast upon their beauty.

Perhaps it was the weather, but I could think of nothing but poor
Queen Mary! She had drifted into my imagination with the _haar_, so
that I could fancy her homesick gaze across the water as she murmured,
"_Adieu, ma chere France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!_"--could
fancy her saying as in Allan Cunningham's verse:--

"The sun rises bright in France,
And fair sets he;
But he hath tint the blithe blink he had
In my ain countree."

And then I recalled Mary's first good-night in Edinburgh: that
"serenade of 500 rascals with vile fiddles and rebecks;" that singing,
"in bad accord," of Protestant psalms by the wet crowd beneath the
palace windows, while the fires on Arthur's Seat shot flickering
gleams of welcome through the dreary fog. What a lullaby for poor
Mary, half Frenchwoman and all Papist!

It is but just to remember the "indefa