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 seen 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 greyness, 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