The well-known story of Queen Margaret, the grand-niece of Edward the Confessor, is that she and her brother Edgar Atheling and her sister Christian all fled from England and William the Conqueror, and were wrecked in the Firth of Forth. The King of Scotland, Malcolm Canmore, was the son of that Duncan whom Macbeth put out of the way--in Scottish history as well as in Shakespeare’s play,--and he had fled from the usurper, and had spent his years of exile at the Saxon Court of Edward the Confessor. The son of Duncan From whom this tyrant holds the due of birth Lives in the English court; and is received Of the most pious Edward with such grace That the malevolence of fortune nothing Takes from his high respect. Little wonder that he received the Saxon exiled royal family hospitably. He was a widower, and much older than the Princess Margaret, and a warrior-prince; and he married her at Dunfermline. It all reads like an old-fashioned fairy story,--the Queen, lovely and pious, washing the feet of the poor, founding abbeys and endowing the Church, and filling the Scottish Court with luxury of gold plate and rich raiment, and the pomp of royal guards: the King, brave, warlike, and unlearned, kissing his wife’s missals he was unable to read, and sending for his goldsmith to bind one of them in vellum incased in gold and set with jewels, and then hurrying off to the wars with England, and bringing back English captives to serve as slaves in Scottish homes. The fairy story ends as romantically as it began, for the last chapter tells of the winter days when King Malcolm and his two eldest sons were laying siege to Alnwick Castle to revenge a Scottish garrison, and Queen Margaret, dangerously ill, watched and waited with her group of younger children and her Confessor, Bishop Turgot, at Edinburgh Castle. Bitterly cold it must have been in the Castle, where the bleak wind would howl at night, and the snow melt as it fell on the rough masonry jutting out of the rougher rock. Below, the leafless winter woods skirted wild morasses and lochs, and stretched over hill and dale to the line of sea--that sea where the Queen had been wrecked nearly a quarter of a century before, and which she had crossed so often by ferry. But, in spite of cold and suffering, the ascetic Queen spent her time in the little stone oratory in prayer and vigil for her absent lord. On the fourth day Prince Edgar, the second son, returned, and told his dying mother that her husband and her firstborn son had both been killed. Queen Margaret, with words of prayer and resignation, died almost immediately after hearing the news. This was on the 16th of November 1093. Hardly had Bishop Turgot and the royal orphans closed the mother’s eyes before they were roused by new troubles. They looked down over the fortress walls and saw the Castle hill surrounded by what must have seemed to them a horde of howling