The palace of Holyrood adjoining the Abbey was built round a great square court, with a towered and pinnacled frontage facing a huge outer courtyard separating the palace precincts from the fringes of the town, and at the back meeting the Abbey. The whole palace and its extensions and smaller courts were set in walled grounds, stretching to the base of Arthur’s Seat. These included pleasure gardens, plantations, and buildings, among which was the quaint building still called “Queen Mary’s Bath.” The north-west corner of the palace proper terminated in a turreted tower which contained Queen Mary’s rooms, and this tower, rebuilt by James V. on the foundations of James IV.’s building, still forms part of the modern Holyrood, and in it, to-day, Mary’s life stands revealed. In these rooms she moved and smiled, spoke and wept. Here it was that she tried, with her beauty and her wit and her courtesy and her wonderful power of forbearance, to soften her rude nobles and turn their harsh disapproval into loyalty. Here, in the audience chamber, the first two of her famous interviews with John Knox took place. In Queen Mary’s day most of the ground now devoted to the formal grass and gravel of unused palace gardens was covered by the great Abbey. It was at the High Altar of this Abbey, where the Royal Jameses had led their very youthful brides, that Queen Mary, dressed in a robe of black velvet, was married, between five and six o’clock one Sunday morning in July, to her cousin Lord Darnley, a dissipated boy of nineteen. It was in the tiny little room leading off the Queen’s room, where the lifted tapestry still shows the entrance to the secret stair between her room and Darnley’s, that she sat at supper on the night of Riccio’s murder. With her were her sister the Countess of Argyle, and several of the Household, including the lay Abbot of Holyrood, and the Queen’s Secretary, the doomed Riccio. Darnley entered and seated himself. At that signal suddenly there broke in upon them the brutal Lord Ruthven, followed by the other assassins, and seized the Italian favourite who was clinging to the Queen’s skirts for protection and crying “Sauve ma vie, Madame! sauve ma vie!” The table was thrown down on the Queen as they struggled, and one of the murderers levelled a pistol at her. They dragged the bleeding body out, across the Queen’s bedroom to the entrance of the presence chamber, where they despatched him with “whingers and swords,” and the blood from his fifty-six wounds soaked through the wooden floor. All that night the outraged Queen was a captive in her own palace, whence the Earls of Bothwell and Huntly had escaped by ropes from the back windows. The Provost and town “caused ring their common bell,” and came to see to the safety of their Queen; but the Queen was told by her lords, her husband’s accomplices, that they would “cut her into collops and cast her over the wall if she attempted to speak to them.” All this a few