'Say _monseigneur_, M. le Maire; you are addressing a Viscount,' said the Chevalier Livingstone; and the magistrate bowed thrice to his red garters. 'There is a piece of the true cross there,' he added, with his impudent smile, 'in a golden shrine that cost a thousand louis d'ors, and the abbess is only four-and-twenty years old, while there is not a novice over sixteen.' 'Tête Dieu!' exclaimed the Chevalier; 'do you say so?' 'Not one over sixteen, messieurs, and all high born and beautiful.' 'By the devil's death, I shall visit them,' said Dundrennan, putting his foot in his stirrup; 'I must see all these pretty ones, hap what may.' 'But how?' I asked. 'Viscount, you are mad!' exclaimed Cheyne and others. 'How so, gentlemen?' said he, mounting; 'I am the grandson of a commendator.' 'The devil!' exclaimed the Chevalier, laughing; 'dost think the nuns will esteem you the more for that?' 'But how will you enter?' I asked. ''Tis very simple. I fall sick at the gate or am thrown from my horse, and the sympathizing abbess, the kind nuns and pretty little novices, carry me in; they remove my helmet--they bathe my temples with perfumes, and with their own soft hands, and thus the fortress is taken by stratagem.' 'Beware, Viscount, I beseech you,' said I; 'such pranks may bring you to the Bastille.' 'Viscount, you are incorrigible!' said Sir Quentin Home. 'Ten crowns to one, you don't get entrance,' said the reckless Chevalier Livingstone. 'You shall see, gentlemen--my ten crowns are won,' cried the madcap Viscount, as he galloped away with all his brilliant accoutrements flashing in the sun; and the waggish maire rubbed his hands with glee, as he saw him cross the bridge and ascend the height on which the sequestered convent stood. In an hour be rejoined us, looking rather grave and a little ashamed of himself and of his prank. 'How about our little bet?' asked Livingstone. 'You have lost, Chevalier,' said Dundrennan; 'so order dinner for us all at the hotel.' He had fully succeeded; but the nuns proved to be all old women; there was not a novice in the house, and the abbess was in her sixty-seventh year. She was a lady of noble and magnificent presence, and on discovering her visitor to be a gentleman of the Scottish Guard, announced herself to be Mary Stuart--that mysterious nun who was then so well known in France as the Mother of Resurrection, and who was openly affirmed to be the daughter of the wicked Earl of Bothwell, and the unhappy Mary Queen of Scots--born in Lochleven, and kidnapped to France--a descent also claimed by an eminent divine in Scotland. She had received the Viscount kindly, gracefully, and told him who she was supposed to be; and he returned to us, in a more sober mood than we had seen him in for many a day.