“And this was once a gay court!” thought she, as she listened to the dreary echo of her own footsteps; “and this very ground on which I now stand was trod by the hapless Mary Stuart!  Her eye beheld the same objects that mine now rests upon; her hand has touched the draperies I now hold in mine.  These frail memorials remain; but what remains of Scotland’s Queen but a blighted name!”

Even the blood-stained chamber possessed a nameless charm for Mary’s vivid imagination.  She had not entirely escaped the superstitions of the country in which she had lived; and she readily yielded her assent to the asseverations of her guide as to its being the bona fide blood of David Rizzio, which for nearly three hundred years had resisted all human efforts to efface.

“My credulity is so harmless,” said she in answer to her uncle’s attempt to laugh her out of her belief, “that I surely may be permitted to indulge it especially since I confess I feel a sort of indescribable pleasure in it.”

“You take a pleasure in the sight of blood!” exclaimed Mr. Douglas in astonishment, “you who turn pale at sight of a cut finger, and shudder at a leg of mutton with the juice in it!”

“Oh! mere modern vulgar blood is very shocking,” answered Mary, with a smile; “but observe how this is mellowed by time into a tint that could not offend the most fastidious fine lady; besides,” added she in a graver tone, “I own I love to believe in things supernatural; it seems to connect us more with another world than when everything is seen to proceed in the mere ordinary course of nature, as it is called.  I cannot bear to imagine a dreary chasm betwixt the inhabitants of this world and beings of a higher sphere; I love to fancy myself surrounded by——­”

“I wish to heaven you would remember you are surrounded by rational beings, and not fall into such rhapsodies,” said her uncle, glancing at a party who stood near them, jesting upon all the objects which Mary had been regarding with so much veneration.  “But come, you have been long enough here.  Let us try whether a breeze on the Calton Hill will not dispel these cobwebs from your brain.”

The day, though cold, was clear and sunny; and the lovely spectacle before them shone forth in all its gay magnificence.  The blue waters lay calm and motionless.  The opposite shores glowed in a thousand varied tints of wood and plain, rock and mountain, cultured field and purple moor.  Beneath, the old town reared its dark brow, and the new one stretched its golden lines; while all around the varied charms of nature lay scattered in that profusion which nature’s hand alone can bestow.

“Oh! this is exquisite!” exclaimed Mary after along pause, in which she had been riveted in admiration of the scene before her.  “And you are in the right, my dear uncle.  The ideas which are inspired by the contemplation of such a spectacle as this are far—­oh, how far!—­superior to those excited by the mere works of art.  There I can, at best, think but of the inferior agents of Providence; here the soul rises from nature up to nature’s God.”