There was nothing awanting in pomp or in splendour at the royal wedding.  The trees were shedding their leaves, the bracken and the heather on the moors were brown, and winds that swept across the Carter Bar and down from the Cheviots had a winter nip in them; but indoors there was warmth enough, and all the gorgeousness and feasting and merrymaking that the most exacting of guests could desire for the marriage of a great king.  The banquet after the wedding was followed by a masque.  Musicians ushered into the banqueting hall of the castle a gorgeously attired procession of dancers, many of them armed men.  It was a radiant scene for the bright eyes of Queen Yolande.  Lights flashed on swords and on armour, and on the sumptuous trappings and brilliant-coloured attire of lords and of ladies, for courts in those days looked like hedges of sweet-peas in the summer sun.  The musicians played their best, the guests mingled gaily with the dancing mummers, and then, suddenly, above all the sounds of music and of revel, there arose a cry, a woman’s cry, shrill and full of fear.  What was that grisly figure that appeared amongst the dancers?—­a grinning skeleton—­a dancing Death.  No masquer this, but a grim messenger from the Shades, bringing dire warning to one, at least, of that gay company.  As it had come, so it vanished, but all the gaiety had gone from the merry throng.  The ill-omened dancer had laid a chilly hand on the heart of many a wedding guest.

There were some who said it was a monkish trick, contrived for his own ends by one of the brethren from Beauvais, but, less than six months later, all Scotland believed that the skeleton masquer at Jedburgh had, indeed, come to warn an unfortunate land of its approaching doom.

On a dark March night of 1286, King Alexander rode along the rough cliff path between Burntisland and Kinghorn on a horse that stumbled in the darkness, and in the morning, on the rocks far down below, the grey waves lapped against the ashen dead face of a mighty king.

Not only was the fair Queen Yolande a widow.  Scotland was widowed indeed.  For long years thereafter she was to be a battlefield for fiercely contending nations, and if the ghost that danced at Jethart was truly a portent of the death of the King of Peace, it also was a portent of the death of many a gallant warrior and of much grievous spilling of innocent blood in the woeful years to come.

A MAN HUNT IN 1813

It was a clear, crisp, sunny day, early in March 1813, that the laird of Wauchope was riding into Hawick.  A little snow still lay on the crest of Cheviot and on some of the foot-hills, and a smirr of hoar-frost silvered the turf by the roadside; but the sun was bright—­strong to overcome frost and snow—­and in it the leaves that still clung to the beech hedges shone like burnished copper.