peasantry, following the example of their lords, had allowed their
homes to be ravaged without lifting an arm in their defense.
Opposition being over, nothing could then threaten her husband from the
enemy; and was not the person who had taken him from Ellerslie a friend?

Before Wallace's departure he had spoken to Marion alone; he told her
that the stranger was Sir John Monteith, the youngest son of the brave
Walter Lord Monteith,** who had been treacherously put to death by the
English in the early part of the foregoing year. This young man was
bequeathed by his dying father to the particular charge of his friend
William Lord Douglas, at that time governor of Berwick. After the fall
of that place and the captivity of its defender, Sir Jon Monteith had
retired to Douglas Castle, in the vicinity of Lanark, and was now the
sole master of that princely residence: James Douglas, the only son of
its veteran lord, being still at Paris, whither he had been dispatched,
before the defeat at Dunbar, to negotiate a league between the French
monarch and the then King of Scots.

**Walter Stewart, the father of Sir John Monteith, assumed the name and
earldom of Monteith in right of his wife, the daughter and heiress of
the preceding earl. When his wife died he married an Englishwoman of
rank, who, finding him ardently attached to the liberties of his
country, cut him off by poison, and was rewarded by the enemies of
Scotland for this murder with the hand of a British nobleman.-(1809.)

Informed of the privacy in which Wallace wished to live, Monteith had
never ventured to disturb it until this day; but knowing the steady
honor of his old school-companion, he came to entreat him, by the
respect he entertained for the brave Douglas, and by his love for his
country, that he would not refuse to accompany him to the brave exile's