The boys hallooed this sentiment to the echo, and the echo took it up
and sent it back so vigorously that even a timid man might have been
inspired. "Mary Stuart," "Henry Darnley," "James Bothwell," the lads
went on calling to the echo alternately--names which are not mere
echoes even after three hundred years, but live on by sheer force of
tragic romance. And it was possible that here, on this very spot, that
historical trio had stood and laughed and talked and amused themselves
as the young Ormistons and their visitors were doing. What words had
they used to rouse the echo? If only it could be made to give them
back now, what a wonderful echo it would be! The world would come
to listen to it. Would it tell of the passions of love and ambition,
grief and hatred, all hurrying their victims to their doom? or was the
place sacred only to gentler memories and softer moods--the scene
of enjoyment and freedom from care for however short a time? Who can
tell?

There was a woman in the village of Cockhoolet who was ninety-eight
years old, having all her faculties not perhaps quite so fresh as when
she was nineteen, but in wonderful preservation after having been in
daily use for little short of a century. She was one of a long-lived
race: her father had been eighty-nine when he died, and her
grandfather ninety-nine. Now, it is perfectly possible--and, as the
family had been on the spot for centuries, it is even probable--that
her great-grandfather might have dug the hole in which Mary planted
her tree, or he may have saddled the queen's horse when she went
hunting, or stood by the roadside and lifted his bonnet as she and her
gay train swept by. Or he may have been despatched upon royal errands
through the subterranean passage which is said to exist all the way
between Cockhoolet Castle and Edinburgh--the private telegraph of