After the blowing up of the Kirk of the Field, the only one of Darnley's servants that escaped was brought by the Earl of Murray before the English Council, and there gave evidence, implying that Queen Mary--that ever-interesting princess, who has been doubtlessly both over-decried by her foes and over-praised by her friends--was cognisant of the intended murder of her husband, inasmuch as, beforehand, she ordered an old bed to be placed in Darnley's room, and the richer bed that previously stood in it to be removed. Nearly three hundred years after that dark and sordid insinuation was made, a roll of papers was casually found, during a search among some legal documents of the early part of the seventeenth century, and one of the leaves in that roll contained a contemporary and authenticated official return of the royal furniture lost by the blowing up of the King's residence. Among other items, this leaf proved, beyond the possibility of further cavil, that the bed which stood in Darnley's room was, up to the time of his death, unchanged, and was not, as alleged by Mary's enemies, an old and worthless piece of furniture, but, on the contrary, was "a bed of violet velvet, with double hangings, braided with gold and silver (ung lictz de veloux viollet a double pante passemente dor et argent)." The finest old Teutonic cross in Scotland is the well-known pillar which stands in the churchyard of Ruthwell, in Dumfriesshire. It was ignominiously thrown down, by a decree of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in 1642; but its broken fragments were collected, as far as possible, and the cross itself again erected, by the late clergyman of the parish, Dr. Henry Duncan, who published in the Transactions of this Society correct drawings of the Runic inscription on this ancient monument. Two Danish antiquaries, Repp and Finn Magnusen, tried to read these Runic lines, and tortured them into very opposite, and let me simply add, very ridiculous meanings, about a grant of land and cows in Ashlafardhal, and Offa, a kinsman of Woden, transferring property to Ashloff, etc., all which they duly published. That great antiquary and Saxon scholar, the late Mr. Kemble, then happened to turn his attention to the Ruthwell inscription, and saw the runes or language to be Anglo-Saxon, and in no ways Scandinavian, as had been supposed. He found that the inscription consisted of a poem, or extracts from a poem, in Anglo-Saxon, in which the stone cross, speaking in the first person, described itself as overwhelmed with sorrow because it had borne Christ raised upon it at His crucifixion, had been stained with the blood poured from His side, and had witnessed His agonies,-- "I raised the powerful King, The Lord of the heavens; I dared not fall down," etc. etc.